Should Shabana Mahmood be removed as home secretary and her asylum policies scrapped?

The chamber closed 13 to 8 against sacking the home secretary and binning her asylum plans, a solid if not overwhelming rejection of the Dubs case for her removal. With 21 profiled voters, this was never a landslide of Farage-style proportions, but the margin held up cleanly across the sample.

The sharpest signal came from the 25-34 bracket, the only age group large enough to trust, which broke 13% yes to 87% no — a near-unanimous vote of confidence in Mahmood staying put, sharper even than the chamber-wide split. Among men, the largest single group at 13 votes, opposition to removal ran just as hard, at 77% no, suggesting this was less a youth phenomenon than a broader instinct against Labour peers dictating Home Office staffing from the crossbenches.

The question landed on the fault line that has run through Labour's asylum politics since it took office: whether toughening the system is statecraft or betrayal of the party's own instincts on refugees, the very tension Dubs, a former child refugee himself, was needling. Voters here were unmoved by that moral framing, preferring to back the minister over the backbench conscience.

If Number 10's reported standoff with Mahmood was meant to test her standing, this chamber gave her a clear, if modest, mandate to stay.