My promise to focus on music was short-lived but you all knew this was coming. Some people would prefer to never have to engage with politics but, realistically speaking, politics is unavoidable; you might not be interested in it, but it's certainly interested in you. It wasn't even a year ago since Birmingham's bankrupt city council cut funding to the arts and culture sector; musicians with nary a political post on their social media feeds started posting about how distraught they were and how this would damage our culture and effect the future generations and take away peoples' jobs– then they all promptly dropped the subject and never mentioned it again. Well, maybe a new government could be the change they need? See, music is political, like it or not, because it's a massively social affair which requires significant funding.

It was no surprise that Labour won the election. It was not even a surprise that they won by a landslide, as every MRP poll predicted. The obvious takeaway is that Tory policies since the Cameron premiership have become increasingly unpopular. True as that is, however, it belies another, more interesting story shown both in the Labour Party's actions and data collected from surveys: Labour isn't actually that popular, and most people are just apathetic about politics in general.

The vast majority of people who voted Labour in this election did so with the explicit intention to remove the Tories from power.^[1] While Labour won the vast majority share of seats they won a rather small majority share of votes. In other words, if we were under a proportional voting system rather than the first past the post voting system we would have seen a vastly decreased seat share for Labour (although would have still won) and an increased seat share for Reform, the Greens and Independents. Labour achieved a ridiculously high vote-to-seat ratio winning 63% of all seats with only 34% of the vote, an impressive 1.85× seat-to-vote ratio, a massive increase over the previous record of 1.55×, achieved by Blair's Labour in 2001. In fact, Starmer's Labour received less votes in this election than Corbyn's Labour did.^[2] Votes simply became more tactical and concentrated in seats, with a country-wide effort to remove the Tories from power at any cost; many would-be Labour voters in Tory seats where the Liberal Democrats were the stronger opposition voted tactically, preferring Labour but voting Lib Dem just to remove the Tories, this effect also working in reverse to inflate the Liberal Democrats' numbers. This wasn't a win for Labour because people love Labour, this was a win for Labour because people hate the Tories and view Labour as the strongest opposition.

Perhaps the biggest winners of this election were the Greens, who made significant gains over both the Tories and Labour compared to the previous election cycle, holding on to their previously only seat with a new MP and gaining three more, plus a surprisingly high vote share for a party that did not campaign in many seats.^[3] Labour also lost seats to independents such as the exiled Jeremy Corbyn, showing that his policies are still more popular than the current Labour Party's, the Tory Iain Duncan Smith, who won when the Labour vote-share was split between the Labour candidate and the also exiled Faiza Shaheen (exiled from the Labour Party for highlighting islamophobia she experienced within the party on Twitter), and various other pro-Palestine independents, showing that Labour's pro-Israel policies are also unpopular. The Greens, Lib Dems and many of the Independents can be described as starkly progressive compared to Starmer's Labour Party, the most obvious example of this being their contrasting policies on climate change and especially transgender healthcare.

And, increasingly, voters have become disillusioned with both the Tories and Labour, voting for minor parties such as Liberal Democrats, Greens, Reform or Independents or not at all. Indeed, this is the election with the second lowest voter turnout, with only 60% turnout across the UK,^[4] and the least proportional in British history, because of that 1.85× seat-to-vote ratio. Or, as the "proportional voting" and "ranked choice" crowds will say, it was the least democratically representative ever.

All of this creates a significantly more complex story. Even though Labour has won the race Starmer just isn't popular and Labour's overwhelming success is an obvious historical and statistical anomaly. Due to low turnouts and the explicit desire to "get rid of the Tories" suggests that voters will not be loyal unless Starmer can turn this crumbling country around within his term. All of this fuels various campaigns for proportional voting with near infinite ammo, this policy also being promised by the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Reform, all of which would significantly benefit from it as minor parties (as in, not the two leading parties).

Labour should feel quite nervous. If you're anything like me then you'd get lumped in with the nebulously defined bogeyman of "The Woke Left." Well, it's important that "The Woke Left" does not give Starmer's Labour a honeymoon, using this weakness to push it to make more sound decisions. There are several key issues where Labour is falling short, which will no doubt see significant pressure from socially liberal groups: Labour's pro-Israel stance is proliferating the genocide of Palestinians, Starmer's transphobic rhetoric, tolerance and even support for hateful figures is contributing to a manufactured war on transgender people, and Labour walking back their climate promises means that the UK won't go net-zero any time soon, proliferating the climate crisis.