Should Parliament approve the designation of Iran's IRGC and HAYI as terror groups?

There was barely a contest here. Voters backed the proscription of Iran's IRGC and HAYI by better than four to one, and the shape of the vote suggests this landed as a security question rather than a partisan one — the kind of near-unanimity that tends to follow a visible atrocity, in this case the Golders Green arson, more than an abstract debate about foreign policy.

The one crack worth reading is generational rather than ideological: the 25-34s were the only cohort not to close ranks, splitting roughly down the middle while teenagers, the middle-aged and pensioners alike voted yes almost to a person. That points less to a coherent anti-designation camp than to a younger professional bracket more wary of expansive state-threat powers, or more sceptical of ministers moving fast on national security legislation, even as older voters treated the case as self-evident.

The result sits squarely in Britain's post-2016 pattern of rallying behind executive action against state-linked terrorism, echoing the near-unanimous backing security bills tend to get once specific attacks are named rather than hypothesised. It is the sort of question where Parliament, on this evidence, will find the country largely already decided.

Where consensus this lopsided usually needs no debate, it got one anyway — and even that barely dented the verdict.