Steel safeguarding scraped through, 11 votes to 8, the kind of margin that flatters no side and settles nothing. On a chamber this size a swing of two or three votes would have flipped it, and the overall 58% figure conceals how uneven the enthusiasm for keeping the quotas actually was.
The story here is generational and concentrated rather than broad-based. Voters aged 25-34 supplied nine of the nineteen votes and backed protection by 7 to 2, effectively deciding the result on their own, while the rest of the chamber, thin as those samples are, tilted the other way or split down the middle. The 16-24s went 2-0 against, and the older cohorts showed no comparable appetite for intervention.
There was a gender gap too, with men backing the quotas 7 to 4 and women splitting closer to even at 3 to 4, though both groups are small enough that this should be read as a tendency rather than a verdict. Together the patterns echo the familiar tension in trade policy since 2016: a younger, more interventionist instinct running up against manufacturers' warnings, echoed by the Confederation of British Metalforming, that shielding one industry raises costs for others down the chain.
A win, then, but one built on a single demographic pillar rather than a national consensus.
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