Should UK businesses importing soy, palm oil, cocoa and rubber be required to prove their products are not linked to illegal deforestation?

Voters here backed mandatory deforestation due-diligence checks on soy, palm oil, cocoa and rubber imports by two to one, 14 votes to 7. That's a comfortable win rather than a rout, and the seven dissenters are enough to show this isn't the environmental gimme it might first appear.

The real story is generational. The 16-24s were nearly unanimous, 4 of 5, while the 35-44 group split down the middle at 2-2, the only bracket to show no majority either way. The 25-34s, the largest cohort at 11 votes, landed close to the overall result at 64% yes. Gender made almost no difference, men and women voting within four points of each other.

That age gradient echoes a familiar pattern in green-supply-chain politics, where younger voters have grown up amid climate and deforestation coverage while a middle cohort - often the ones actually running or buying from these businesses - is warier of new compliance burdens on trade. It sits alongside the same tension that shaped the Environment Act itself: enforcement teeth versus cost to importers.

A clear yes, then, but one where the generation gap did more work than gender ever could.