Should the government reinstate a higher bank surcharge to raise public revenue?

What looks like a narrow win for reinstating the bank surcharge is really two electorates talking past each other. Younger voters backed it almost to a person, while the 55-and-overs turned against it by roughly two to one — the kind of split that suggests this was never really a technical argument about competitiveness, but a proxy for who feels the state owes them something back.

The generational line is stark: every 16-24 voter said yes, and support held up strongly among the 25-34s too, but it inverts hard from the mid-30s onward, bottoming out with the over-65s rejecting it almost unanimously. Men tilted yes, women split against it two to one, adding a second fault line running alongside the age one rather than cutting across it.

It echoes a familiar post-2008 argument about who pays for financial stability and who benefits from it — younger voters, still locked out of housing and wealth-building, more willing to see banks as a source of public revenue than a fragile ecosystem to be protected. Older voters, closer to the City or its pension arrangements, remain warier of anything that smells like a windfall grab.

A 53% yes vote, then, is less a verdict than a snapshot of a generational ledger still being settled.