Verdicts

The verdict

“Transparency is a necessity to have a healthy democracy” carried the room: Yes won decisively, with the strongest voices treating spent convictions as a question of public trust.

The verdict

“It is intolerable to reward companies...” was the room’s sharpest moral judgement; Yes won by nearly nine to one, with the debate turning on punishment, ownership and who pays.

The verdict

A near-draw produced a clear enough verdict: No narrowly prevailed, while the floor’s strongest argument said the scheme should test genuine need rather than engine size.

The verdict

The winning side argued that university has become “a money making machine”, and it carried the vote by nearly five to one. No voter on the losing side left a case behind.

The verdict

The sharpest line came from the losing side: a “gentle retreat over a few generations” was called a good thing, even as Yes won by more than two to one.

The verdict

Abolishing Holyrood scraped through, but the chamber’s best-respected Yes voice wanted not less devolved power, but power broken up: “What if the powers were given to regional councils?”

The verdict

No prevailed narrowly, but the losing side supplied the room’s most vivid warning: “There is no way anybody will ever buy a house again” while renters keep paying landlords’ mortgages.

The verdict

The winning Yes case was bluntly practical — “We should spend the billions stopping the actual invasion happening right now.” Yes won by more than two to one, even as the debate repeatedly widened from an indigenous missile system to nuclear weapons themselves.

The verdict

The striking result is not only that Yes won clearly, but that the winning case was the only case the chamber chose to put on the page: six Yes voices, no No argument, and a verdict of 98 votes to 55.

The verdict

The chamber’s overwhelming No was less a defence of the rich than a rejection of the question’s moral shortcut: the sharpest Yes case argued that wealth turns on conduct, not essence.

The verdict

The floor's most-respected No voice supplied the sharpest joke — “Need to be half pis sed to sit through some of the discussions in parliament” — as Westminster's drinking culture lost the vote.

The verdict

The chamber almost split over direct democracy, and the floor’s sharpest Yes voice reduced the case to “part of an answer, not the whole tho” as No edged ahead.

The verdict

The chamber narrowly chose Yes, but the memorable line came from the losing side: “Labour cannot see a golden goose without strangling it.”

The verdict

The floor’s sharpest No line saw dual citizenship as “a slightly better chance of deporting unwanted people”; No won a clear majority, while the lone Yes voice wanted a tougher route to citizenship instead.

The verdict

A narrow Yes verdict was powered less by legal theory than by the blunt promise that “Servicing the debt costs billions” that could otherwise cut taxes for workers.

The verdict

The case for another EU vote found a chamber more wary of repetition than persuaded by the polls, with “vote till they get it right” the sharpest No line.

The verdict

What stands out is not just that No won by nearly two to one, but that it won unopposed: not a single Yes voter showed up to make the case for Miliband's foreign policy pivot, leaving 153 votes to be shaped entirely by the side that didn't want it.

The verdict

This was less a vote than a rout, with six in seven voters rejecting the idea of stripping the jobless of a ballot, and the chamber's sharpest lines came not from the case for the change but from the pile-on against it.

The verdict

A narrow win for intervention, this one, but the chamber's sharpest thinking lived almost entirely on the losing side, with No voters doing the analytical heavy lifting while Yes carried the vote on sentiment alone.

The verdict

Three in five voters here backed Farage taking up Rupert Lowe's olive branch, yet the sharpest, most-respected voice on the page belonged to the opposition — a No arguing gleefully that a split right suits everyone else fine.

The verdict

Three in four voters here decided the taxpayer's right to know outweighs the claimant's right to privacy, in a debate where the losing side supplied the only argument built on a named risk rather than a grievance.

The verdict

Nearly nine in ten of the 151 who voted backed reform, but almost nobody on the winning side agreed on what it should look like — a consensus on the diagnosis, not the cure.

The verdict

A modest majority backed more support for Kyiv, but the sharper writing came from the side that lost: five separate No arguments, against just two from Yes, meaning those who won the vote barely bothered to make the case.

The verdict

Three to one for a written constitution, yet the loudest voice in the room belonged to the losing side, and its worry was not principle but personnel — who gets to hold the pen.