Gary Stevenson's 2% levy on fortunes above £10 million scraped a yes, 32 votes to 30, the kind of margin that settles nothing and reveals everything about how unevenly Britain-on-the-platform feels its own precarity. The headline number flatters a consensus that does not exist beneath it.
Look at the age curve and it bends into a U: the youngest voters leaned yes, the 55-64s were the most emphatic backers of all, roughly three in four of them for it, while the 35-44s all but unanimously rejected it. That middle cohort, squeezed by mortgages, childcare and stalled careers, was the one bloc to break decisively against a policy sold as relief for exactly that squeeze. Men and women split apart too, with men backing the tax by three to two and women tilting against it by a similar margin, a gender gap as wide as any age gap in the chamber.
The fault line here is the familiar one from the wealth-tax debate since Piketty: redistribution has broad appeal in principle, but support thins out precisely among those old enough to have skin in the housing and pension game yet not old enough to have banked the gains. Stevenson's pitch to the young and the retired landed better than his pitch to the squeezed middle.
A policy meant to unite the anxious instead found its sharpest opponents among the anxious themselves.
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