Should the house of Lords be scrapped for a better system based on business leaders, academics and others?

The age profile alone punctures the easy story about generational impatience with old institutions. It was the pensioners, the cohort with the longest memory of the Lords as it is, who voted almost to a person for tearing it up, while the youngest voters here were merely lukewarm — a reminder that appetite for constitutional upheaval doesn't always track with proximity to the status quo.

The sharper fracture ran along gender lines: men backed abolition by four to one, women split the other way, leaning against scrapping the chamber for a meritocratic substitute. That split hints at a real disagreement buried in the question's framing — whether swapping peers for "business leaders, academics and others" counts as democratising the second chamber or simply changing who gets to be unelected.

It lands squarely on the fault line that has run through every failed reform effort since the Blair years: is the problem that the Lords is unelected, or that the wrong unelected people sit in it. A chamber voting to replace peers with technocrats rather than voters suggests plenty here think it's the latter.

That the keenest reformers were the oldest voters, not the youngest, is the kind of result that should trouble anyone's tidy theory of where appetite for constitutional change actually lives.