Did Margaret Thatcher's reforms unduly impact the nation outside of the south east?

Yes won comfortably, 57 to 19, a three-to-one rout on the question of whether Thatcher's reforms hit the regions outside the south east unfairly. On raw numbers this reads as a landslide, the kind of result that leaves little room for the losing side to claim moral ground.

But the age breakdown complicates the "settled verdict" reading. The 25-34s, too young to have any lived memory of the 1980s, voted yes to a person, 27 out of 27. The 65+ cohort, old enough to have voted in 1979 or 1983, also broke heavily yes at 88%. It is the 55-64s — the generation that came of age amid the miners' strikes and steel closures — who were the only bracket to tip into no, 42% yes against a majority against. That inversion, the group closest to the history being the most sceptical of the "unduly harmed" framing, is the sharpest thing in this data.

The pattern echoes a familiar split in how Britain relitigates the 1980s: distance often produces more certainty than proximity, with younger voters treating deindustrialisation as settled historical injustice while those who lived through it are more divided on apportioning blame. Gender added little texture here, men and women voting within four points of each other.

A vote that looks like consensus from a distance, and turns out to be generational memory pulling in opposite directions the closer you get to it.