Has Utilities privatisation failed?

The remarkable thing about this vote is how little the generations disagreed. Britain's referendums on economic questions almost always fracture by age, yet here the oldest voters, who remember the sell-offs themselves, were just as damning as the youngest cohort that has only known bills and sewage headlines, if not more so. Water, gas and electricity as a business model failed a stress test that ran across every bracket.

Men and women told slightly different stories, with women somewhat more equivocal, though both sides finished well clear of the halfway mark. The one soft spot was the youngest voters, barely a supermajority and the only group where the no camp mustered real numbers, a reminder that Gen Z's relationship to privatised utilities may be more transactional than furious.

The result echoes a live political fault line: Thames Water's near-collapse, Ofwat's credibility crisis, and a decade of sewage discharges have turned what was once a Thatcherite triumph into shorthand for regulatory failure. Renationalisation, once a fringe demand, now polls as common sense across a chamber spanning pensioners to twentysomethings.

Four decades on, the shareholders got their dividends; the public, it seems, wants its verdict noted.