Should the UK government prioritise economic growth and national security in its new space strategy?

For a subject that could easily have split along the usual battle lines of spending versus scepticism, this one didn't much bother to divide the chamber at all. Every age band from the barely-out-of-school to the pension-age voters backed the strategy, with the oldest cohort among the most convinced of all — a rare moment of generational agreement on where taxpayer billions should go.

The one crack worth noting ran along gender rather than age: men backed the plan nine to one, while women were markedly more split, with almost three in ten voting no. That gap hints at a familiar pattern in defence-and-industrial-strategy votes, where framing security spending as growth policy tends to land better with male voters than female ones.

The result also sits comfortably within a broader post-Brexit instinct to recast big state investment — in space, in defence, in "sovereign capability" — as economic strategy rather than mere security spending, a framing this chamber evidently found persuasive.

If the government was hoping for a mandate to talk about rockets and resilience in the same breath as jobs and growth, it got one, emphatically.