Should Burnham hand England's regions sweeping new powers in a "devolution big bang"?

The most striking thing about this vote is not the topline defeat for devolution but the age cliff underneath it: the youngest cohort here waved the plan through almost to a person, while every age bracket from 35 upward turned against it, some by two to one. That is not the pattern of a settled ideological argument, it looks more like a split between those who see fragmented regional power as the future and those old enough to remember, or suspect, how such reforms tend to bed down.

Gender told a quieter version of the same story: women in the chamber split down the middle, men leaned firmly against, suggesting the scepticism was less about devolution as a principle than about trusting this particular handover of Whitehall power to survive contact with real budgets and real politicians.

The debate echoes the wider unfinished business of English devolution since the Blair-era assemblies and the Osborne "metro mayor" experiment, where enthusiasm for local control has always run ahead of clarity about who actually keeps the purse strings, a tension Burnham himself built his Manchester reputation on managing.

That tension surfaced directly in the chamber's two most respected arguments. The Yes case, from Cathryn, insisted this was "carefully devolving with appropriate funding and well thought thru ways of making sure regions have what they need", not a reckless handout of power; the No case, from warmana, dismissed the whole premise, arguing that "overall control remains centralised" and that anything short of "true independence" is "nothing more than an increase in costly government".

Burnham gets his devolution debate, but not yet his big bang, and the age gap suggests this fight is only just getting started.