Should the UK restore the 0.7% of national income overseas aid target?

There is little sign in this vote of the coalition Andy Burnham would need to build. Restoring the 0.7% aid target was crushed by four to one, and the opposition was not concentrated in any one predictable corner — it ran through every age group and both sexes, from the youngest voter present to the oldest.

If anything the sharpest split cuts against the usual generational script: the 55-64s, often assumed to be Labour's most reliable bloc, were the most hostile of all age groups, while the middle-aged 35-44s were, relatively speaking, the closest to sympathetic, though even they rejected it two to one. Women who voted were markedly firmer against restoration than men, with barely one in ten backing it against a third of men.

The result lands squarely on the fault line Starmer opened when he chose to cut aid further to fund defence rather than reverse Sunak's 2020 retreat from the Brown-era pledge — a decision that split Labour's own MPs and drew fire from the New Economics Foundation. This vote suggests that, whatever the intra-party pressure on Burnham, the wider public mood offers him little cover to promise a ten-year path back to 0.7%.

For a target once treated as a hard-won consensus, what stands out is how little constituency remains to fight for it.