Should the UK change the 1971 law to allow deportation of Shabir Ahmed?

There are votes that split a country and votes that simply confirm what almost everyone already believed, and this was emphatically the second kind: five in six of the 86 who took part backed changing the 1971 rule to clear the way for Shabir Ahmed's deportation. What's striking isn't the winning margin so much as its total absence of a fault line — the 55-64s, the group most engaged here, backed it as strongly as the youngest voters did, and women were, if anything, marginally more united than men.

That flatness is itself the story. Grooming-gang cases have become one of the few issues where public anger cuts cleanly across the usual splits of age and politics, and this vote reproduces that pattern in miniature — nobody organised into a "no" bloc worth the name, just a scattering of dissenters in every bracket.

The result lands on a genuinely live fault line: Britain's post-imperial citizenship law, built for a different era of Commonwealth ties, running up against a public that increasingly wants deportation powers to follow the crime rather than the paperwork. Shabana Mahmood's proposed fix, on this evidence, isn't a hard sell.

The debate here wasn't whether to close the loophole, but why it was ever open.