Does the Right have a problem with violence?

The closeness of the result hides a sharper story underneath: the young broke decisively toward Yes, with the under-25s and 25-34s both backing the proposition comfortably, while the 35-64s swung hard the other way, especially those in their late thirties and fifties, who rejected it by wide margins. That is less a left-right split than a generational one — younger voters, closer to the discourse of online radicalisation and culture-war rhetoric, more willing to name a side as the problem; older voters more inclined to see violence as diffuse and political tribalism itself as the disease.

Gender cut in the same direction, only starker: men were evenly divided, but women who voted rejected the idea that violence sits on one side by more than two to one. That gap suggests women voters here were less persuaded that this was a moment for apportioning blame and more wary of a framing that could be read as score-settling after a killing.

The vote lands squarely on the fault line the Widdecombe murder opened up — a killing that scrambled the usual MI5-era narrative of far-right threat with a case pointing the other way, and left both tribes accusing each other of inciting the atmosphere that produced it. In that sense the No majority reads less as an acquittal of the right than as a refusal to let one attack rewrite twenty years of data.

What tipped the floor was less data than temperament. The Yes side's most-respected voice went for the jugular — "they are a death cult - they just can't wait to see the blood spill" — while the top No argument simply flattened the premise: "violent people are violent on whatever side." It was the second instinct, cooler and more agnostic, that the chamber narrowly preferred.

A country recently shaken by political murder, asked to point a finger, mostly declined — though the young and the men among them were far readier to.