Should we deport foreign nationals convicted of any imprisonable offence within 5 years of arrival?

There was no real fracture here, which is itself the story: from the youngest voters to pensioners, from men to women, sizeable majorities landed in the same place, with only the over-65s dipping to a still-commanding seven in ten. On a subject that ordinarily produces a generational trench war, the age gaps that did appear were more wobble than divide.

Where a gap did show, it was gender rather than age — men backed removal at nine in ten, women at four in five — a gap narrow enough to read as degree of enthusiasm rather than a genuine parting of ways. That both sexes converged so heavily suggests the appeal here sat less on the usual culture-war axis and more on a shared sense that the system isn't doing what it says on the tin.

The result lands squarely on the fault line that has dogged deportation policy for years: automatic removal on paper, routinely stalled in practice by ECHR appeals, asylum claims and Home Office backlogs. Voters here weren't asked about the principle of deportation in the abstract but about a specific, tightened trigger — any imprisonable offence, five years' grace — and answered as if impatient with the gap between statute and outcome.

The floor's most-respected voice framed the case in transactional terms, arguing that "deportation when the social contract is broken is an additional tool" — a case that treats removal not as punishment but as a mechanism, and one against which no comparably elevated dissent emerged to test it.

A chamber this united on immigration is unusual enough to be the headline in itself; the argument, when it comes, will be over the five years and the "any offence", not over the principle the vote just endorsed almost to a person.