Should the UK increase defence spending to meet NATO's new commitments?

Three in four voters here backed lifting UK defence spending to meet NATO's Ankara commitments, and the shape of that majority tells its own story: this was a vote won on the flanks. Every voter aged 55 and over said yes, without exception, while the middle-aged 45-54 bracket alone pulled the other way, tilting against by three votes to one.

Women were the more emphatic hawks, backing the increase by roughly six to one, against a narrower two-to-one margin among men. The younger cohorts — under-35s and 35-44s alike — leaned yes but with real dissent running through them, suggesting the instinct to fund the NHS and welfare over hardware hasn't vanished, just been outvoted.

The result echoes the wider recalibration since 2022, when the return of state-on-state war in Europe pushed defence back up the agenda after decades of peace-dividend thinking; what's notable is how little partisan hesitation this chamber showed compared with the Treasury's usual guns-versus-butter arithmetic. If there's a fault line at all, it runs through middle age, not through gender or generation as such.

For a question that pits tanks against hospital wards, the closest thing to resistance came not from the young idealists nor the fiscally cautious old, but from Britain's middle years.