Britain has a strange and very peculiar democracy. It is a truly unique product of the country’s long history with some elements that are simply indefensible.

Every democrat will wince at the notion that a modern country still has a hereditary monarch as head of state, yet the Queen continues to have huge support: a recent poll put her popularity at 69%. How many politicians (British or otherwise) could boast as much?

Criticism can be levelled at the House of Lords, stuffed with party nominees who have never faced an electorate and in which Anglican Bishops sit, as of right, while other religious leaders are excluded.

All this is well known.

So too are the defects of the electoral system, which saw nearly 4 million people voting for the right-wing, anti-immigration party – UKIP – yet they won just a single seat. By contrast the Scottish National Party took fewer than 1.5 million votes but won 56 seats. Put another way, it took slightly fewer than 26,000 votes to elect a SNP member of parliament, but 3,881,100 to elect just one MP - Douglas Carswell  - for UKIP.

How can anyone suggest it is right that any Commonwealth citizen (including South Africans) living in Britain can participate in UK elections, yet Europeans who have resided happily in Britain for decades are denied this democratic right?

All very odd, irrational and peculiar; and yet it works and works well.

One element of the May 2015 election is particularly satisfying: the increased number of Black and Ethnic Minority [BME] candidates who were elected. The election produced the most ethnically diverse British parliament in history. There are now 41 BME MPs out of a total of 650.

Increasing diversity in parliament is a great step forward. All those who have been elected deserve to be congratulated. Once upon a time only Labour really courted the BME vote. The Conservatives were distinctly reluctant. Within living memory they used the slogan: “Want a nigger for a neighbour? Vote Labour.”

No longer. Even UKIP has ethnic minority support and stood 24 BME candidates.

Sundar Katwala of the lobby group British Future’s welcomed the transformation.

“A record number of ethnic minority MPs have been elected to the House of Commons – 41 non-white MPs enter the new 2015 parliament compared to 27 at the last General Election, according to British Future’s analysis of the constituency results. Labour retains its lead in the House of Commons overall, with 23 non-white MPs to the Conservatives’ 17, though the 2015 intake captures an increasingly competitive ‘race for representation’ between the two major parties.”

The 41 BME MPs represent 6.3% of the House of Commons. Ethnic minorities today make up around 12% of the British population. So there is clearly more to be done, but the direction of travel is the right one.

Asians have done particularly well. If my analysis below is correct then there are just 9 MPs who can claim African ethnicity, while there are 28 with an Asian heritage. And some African countries are better represented than others.

So well done Ghana – three MPs from a British population estimated at 80,000. But where are the South African and the Kenyan MPs?

There is one important lesson that should not be lost in all of this: there is no opposition to anyone standing for election because of their ethnic background. There is simply no question that anyone should represent the British electorate in parliament if they win the backing of the public. Only in neo-fascist fringe politics is this issue raised and they win next to no support. For the record, the British National Party won just 1,667 in the eight seats it stood in.

In the London suburb of Hampstead, just up the road from where I live, Tulip Siddiq, was victorious. The fact that she is practically Bangladeshi royalty (her maternal grandfather was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, first President of Bangladesh) did not count against her a jot.

No one suggested that she was a “settler” or unwelcome in Britain. There was no public campaign from any party based on her ethnicity. She toured the streets of Kilburn and Hampstead (not all of it as rich or as liberal as critics sometimes assume) without fear of being attacked for her origins.

None of this is to suggest that racism is dead in Britain. But the ugly scars of xenophobia that so disfigure South Africa today are no longer present. I look forward to the day when the first Nigerian born MP sits in the parliament in Cape Town.