Yes carried the day, 45 to 33, a clean sixteen-point margin that nonetheless conceals a result with no obvious demographic logic behind it. This was not the tidy generational story British politics usually tells itself, where the young hold the line for Labour and the old turn on it. Here the under-25s were unanimous that the party is a threat, while it was the 25-34s, of all groups, who broke decisively the other way and voted no by close to two to one.
Everyone else in between sat somewhere in the mid-60s for Yes, a fairly even spread from the 35s through to the 55-64s, before the small band of over-65s split down the middle. Women who registered a view were considerably more convinced than men, siding with Yes roughly seven to three while men themselves were an effective coin toss.
The question itself borrows the language of existential threat rather than ordinary policy disagreement, and the framing behind it, on tax, immigration, energy and spending, tracks the standard charge sheet levelled at governing parties mid-term rather than anything unique to Labour's current majority. What the vote actually shows is less a verdict on any one policy than a chamber uneasy in patches and unpersuaded in others, with age offering no clean fault line at all.
If there is a headline here, it is that the coalition against Labour on this platform runs through mothers and Gen Z alike, not through the pensioners who are supposed to supply it.
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