Should licensed, controlled reintroductions of native species like beavers be expanded to rewild more UK areas?

For an issue that arrived wrapped in a Reform-council row over farmers and land use, this vote was strikingly short of a fight. Rewilding carried by six to one, and the dissent that did surface was thin and scattered rather than organised around any obvious camp.

If there was a fault line, it ran faintly by age and gender rather than politics. The 45-54s and the over-65s backed expansion to a person, and women were all but unanimous behind it too, while the loudest pocket of scepticism sat among the 35-44s and the youngest voters, still solidly in favour but the least lopsided groups in the chamber.

The result echoes a wider pattern in British environmental politics, where measures framed around flood defence and cost-saving, rather than abstract "rewilding", tend to defuse the usual town-versus-country tension. That a Reform-led council backing beavers made headlines at all says more about the party's internal contradictions than about public appetite, which here looks settled.

Britain, or at least this self-selected slice of it, seems ready to let the dam-builders back in.