Of course you didn’t watch coverage of yesterday’s British parliamentary election.

Why would you? You were celebrating the day 248 years ago when, as Archie Bunker said, “we threw those people out of here.”

And, given the bleak U.S. election picture since last week’s debate, a break from democracy on the brink is understandable. (Note: I can’t tell you how happy I am using bleak, break and brink in the same sentence.)

But I watched the BBC’s coverage of the returns for three reasons – one of which is not that I’m scouting places to live in the event the unthinkable happens in November.

One is that BBC election coverage is really entertaining. Great graphics, interesting commentary. The vote count has the drama of the constituency announcement – once ALL the votes are counted, the candidates go on stage and an official reads the results. The candidates include everybody, including people such as the guy from the Monster Raving Loony party.

And we in America have an advantage – we can watch at reasonable hours while the British have to stay up all night.

Second is the fact that I just came back from a wonderful trip to London (Let’s Go Mets!) with my family. Not only did we hang in the central city, we went out to Salisbury to see Stonehenge and to outskirt places west and south of Piccadilly Circus. So I wanted to see how the good people I met last month voted.

The third reason is more pragmatic.

Months before the 2016 presidential election, the British people voted on a binding referendum to determine if the country would stay a part of the European Union. It was a dumb move by the then-and-not-about-to-last-much-longer Conservative prime minister David Cameron, compounded by the fact the vote only needed a simple majority for approval.

The vote was 52% out, 48% stay. The results crossed party lines and reflected a well orchestrated scare and isolationism campaign. 

It was a precursor of what would happen in the United States on November 8. It should have been a warning to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

So should last night.

Yes, Labour – a party more aligned with U.S. Democrats – emerged with a massive majority, meaning that leader Keir Starmer has become prime minister. 

But Labour, thrashed in the 2019 election, had a strong tailwind. The Conservatives had been in power since 2010 and through their bungling gone through five prime ministers. One of them was Boris Johnson, who it would be understandable to think was part of the Monster Raving Loony party.

The now-former PM, Rishi Sunak, is ostentatiously wealthy and not particularly adept at campaigning – in particular, leaving a D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration for a political event.

Labour, still a major party in the country, won. It has a 174-seat majority – that’s like the Democrats or Republicans having more than 63% of the seats in the House or Senate.

Why should the U.S. Democrats be concerned?

There are two issues in the U.K. that have the same footprint on this side of the Atlantic.

One is immigration. A thing I noticed on this, my third trip to London, is how diverse the population has become over the past 40 years. I saw more hijabs than I see in New York. I heard more different languages on the Underground.

The benefit is a more vibrant city. The food is not nearly as terrible as it was in the 1980s. There are young people out well into the night – in the ’80s, the streets were deserted after 10 p.m.

But as in this country, not everybody in Britain is enamored with this. A lot of muttering about “not having a country anymore.”

That’s why there was Brexit. And among the leaders of that movement was Nigel Farage, a Donald Trump wannabe who doesn’t have Trump’s advantage of a right-wing sycophant mediascape; there’s no Fox News in the U.K.

Farage decided to get behind something called the Reform Party, whose idea of reform is actually retreating to the Britain of the past. MBGA doesn’t really work.

The Conservatives were gutted by Reform. Their seats went to Labour, but about 4 million of their votes – perhaps enough to swing the election – went to Reform. Farage won his seat, as did only three other Reform candidates. 

It’s the raw numbers that are scary. You could probably still say Britain moved to the left if you add Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

But Farage is just getting started. He’ll be in a good position to help his buddy Trump this summer and fall by trying to foul up the works in Parliament. And he’s got a soapbox for his bigotry and xenophobia.

The other concern for American democrats (and Democrats) is Gaza.

Independent candidates opposed to Labour’s somewhat equivocal stance on Israeli action in Gaza stole some votes. One party leader expected to be part of the Sturmer government lost his constituency because of defections from Muslim voters in the district.

Gaza is a thorny situation for the U.S. and its allies. This country has always supported – correctly – Israel’s right to exist. It took Harry Truman just 11 minutes to recognize the nation when it came into being in 1948. But Israel’s reaction to the October 7 terrorism of Hamas has provoked a humanitarian crisis that doesn’t just trouble Muslims.

The idea that Palestinians deserve some sort of entity of their own is not unreasonable. Most people in this country – including many if not most American Jews – believe the solution to this long-standing problem is the two-nation one that gives Palestinians a country of some kind and Israel iron-clad security from terrorists.

The people who don’t want that are Hamas and the supporters of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and neither side seems to care what price is paid to affirm their stance. 

There’s a certain irony in the fact that there’s almost a tacit alliance between two sides that are shooting each other. If I was wearing the tin foil hat right-wing America seems to embrace, I could imagine a coalition between Netanyahu, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Vladimir Putin and Trump to make life miserable for Joe Biden all the way to November 5.

The results showing weakness in Labour’s Muslim vote is a warning to Biden or whatever Democrat replaces him if he drops out. The Gaza crisis needs to be solved. Quickly. Both because it’s the moral thing to do and, if Trump wins, there will be no reason for it to stop.