Do you want regional devolution? An assembly of the north, South West and East for example?

What this vote revealed was not so much a settled view on English devolution as a fault line running clean through the age register. Yes carried the day by the narrowest of margins, but that headline number flatters a result built almost entirely on the young: under-35s backed new assemblies for the North, South West and East by something close to two to one, while the 55-64s were the one bloc to break decisively the other way, tipping hard into No.

That divide reads less like a debate about administrative machinery than about who trusts distant institutions to work for them. The young, further from memories of 2004's rejected North East assembly and less invested in Westminster as currently constituted, saw devolution as overdue rebalancing; the older cohort, more sceptical of adding another tier of politicians, wanted power kept where it already sits. Men here were also notably more favourable than women, who split close to evenly, suggesting the enthusiasm for new assemblies is not universally shared even among younger-leaning constituencies.

The result sits squarely on the old English devolution question that Blair's government tried and failed to settle two decades ago, now revived by the mayoral-authority experiment and, in this context, a Burnham-inflected pitch for regional power beyond London. It is the same argument in a new coat: whether England needs its own version of the settlements already given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, or whether that path just multiplies bureaucracy without shifting real control.

That older scepticism found its clearest voice in the chamber's top-rated No case, which dismissed the whole proposition as "more bureaucracy" and called instead for centralising power under "stronger leadership" once "the Eurocrats and Globalists are kicked to the kerb" — a argument that fused devolution-scepticism with a broader distrust of technocratic government rather than engaging directly with the case for regional assemblies.

A Yes this thin, carried mostly by voters under 35, looks less like a mandate than an IOU the young have written for whoever inherits the devolution brief next.