Should the UK seek closer ties with the EU?

The lede here isn't really the margin, comfortable as it was, but the shape of the coalition that produced it. Every age band from 16 to 54 broke for closer EU ties, some emphatically so, before the 55-64s reversed the trend entirely and voted against by a wide margin — the one bloc old enough to remember the 2016 referendum as a lived political event rather than a headline, and the one most inclined to see a "reset" as relitigating a settled question.

Gender told a starker story still, even on modest numbers: men who registered a profile backed closer ties comfortably, while the small group of women who voted ran heavily the other way, suggesting whatever coalition assembled behind Yes was disproportionately male, whatever that says about who feels strongly enough about trade and diplomacy to show up for this one.

The result sits squarely on the fault line the government itself opened by pursuing a security-and-trade "reset" without daring to call it re-entry — a vote that reads less as reversing Brexit than as testing appetite for managing its costs, at a moment when customs friction and regulatory divergence remain live economic irritants rather than settled facts.

What swayed the floor split along familiar lines of tone as much as argument. The most-respected Yes voice was notably unromantic about it — "Yes, but the devil is in the detail" — while the sharpest No voice read the result as a betrayal of 2016 itself, warning that "the 61% are the reason we are getting our country destroyed" and accusing the majority of a "big FU to the 17mill that voted out."

A chamber willing to inch back toward Brussels, but not without one generation making very clear it hasn't forgiven the last time Britain asked this question.