A 71% to 29% verdict is a clear win rather than a squeaker, but the composition of the no vote is the story. Nine votes against sounds modest until you see where they sat: eight of the nineteen men who voted here backed no, pulling the male split down to a much tighter 58% yes, while the small female cohort broke 3 to 1 the other way.
Age produced no coherent fracture to rival that gender gap. The 25-34 bracket, the platform's largest group by far at 13 votes, landed almost exactly on the overall average at 69% yes, and the 55-64s were the most emphatic yes bloc at 86%. The over-65s were the one group evenly split, though on just two votes that reads as a coin toss rather than a generational signal.
The question itself sits squarely on the fault line that has run through British debate since Rotherham and Rochdale, where official inquiries into grooming gangs collided with anxieties about parallel legal and social norms in areas of high Muslim settlement. That this vote produced a large majority for "reformation" rather than a contested split suggests the chamber treated it less as a live culture-war toss-up and more as settled opinion, with men supplying almost all the dissent.
The gender gap here was wider than the age gap, and on this question that is the more revealing fact.
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