Should the UK change the law to allow deportation of the Rochdale grooming gang ringleader?

The headline is emphatic: 35 of the 45 who registered a view backed rewriting the 1971 Immigration Act to strip this man of his protection from deportation. But the more revealing fracture sits beneath that number, between men and women. Male voters broke for change by more than four to one; women were tied, exactly half and half, the only group in the whole vote to show no clear direction at all.

Age tells a subtler story. The youngest cohort, under-25s, were the sole group to lean against changing the law, while every other age band from 25 upward swung decisively yes, peaking with the 55-64s who backed it almost unanimously. There's no straightforward generational arc here — this isn't older voters versus younger liberals, it's a dip in the middle of nobody's expectations.

The case sits at the intersection of two live fault lines: the post-Windrush caution around retrospective immigration law, and the harder edge of public anger since the grooming-gang scandals resurfaced national attention. That the platform's women were the one group not swept along suggests the politics of removal cut differently depending on who's asked, even when the underlying facts are barely in dispute.

A rare case where the "toughen up the law" instinct wasn't universal — just widely shared by everyone except the people you might have expected to feel it most.