Should the UK impose further sanctions on Israel and ban trade in goods from illegal settlements?

What looks at first like a comfortable rejection of Andy Burnham's call for tougher sanctions and a settlements trade ban turns, on closer inspection, into a story about gender rather than generation. Women who took part came down against the proposal almost unanimously, while men divided close to evenly, leaving the overall two-to-one No a product of one group's near-consensus rather than any broad national mood.

Age told a messier story. The youngest voters were unanimous against, the 55-64s dug in hard too, yet the 25-34s were the only sizeable cohort to lean Yes, and the small band of over-65s split closer to the middle than most. No clean generational line emerges, unlike the sharp male-female gulf.

The vote lands on a fault line that has hardened since October 2023: how far Britain should go in translating criticism of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank into concrete economic measures, an argument now bound up with Burnham's own positioning as a Labour leadership rival to the current government's more cautious approach.

That the sharpest divide here was between men and women, not young and old, suggests this argument is being fought along lines Westminster's usual scripts don't quite capture.