Does the UKs financial sector have too much control over the British economy?

What's striking here is not the margin but its uniformity. Every age cohort, from the youngest voters to the over-65s, settled on almost identical territory, somewhere between a slim and a moderate majority for YES. There is no generational story to tell: the 16-24s and the pensioners arrived at nearly the same place, a rare thing on a platform where age usually cleaves opinion sharply.

Gender told a similarly quiet story. Men leaned YES by a modest margin, women split closer to even, but neither group dissented from the broad shape of the result. Nobody here is fighting a culture war over finance; it reads more like a shared, low-grade unease than a partisan flashpoint.

That unease sits squarely on a fault line that has run through British politics since 2008: the City as engine of prosperity versus the City as extractive drag, the tension between the tax receipts and jobs the sector generates and the "finance curse" critics blame for deindustrialisation and regional imbalance. This vote suggests that scepticism about the City's dominance now runs wide rather than deep, cutting across the usual demographic divides.

A dozen points separated YES from NO, but not much else separated anyone.