Verdicts

The verdict

Sovereignty proved a near-unifying instinct: across nearly every age band voters backed reclaiming full control of the deterrent from its US dependencies, with only the youngest cohort showing real hesitation, as the chamber backed the move by six to one.

The verdict

Skepticism, not enthusiasm, greeted Britain's newest prime minister on the platform, where the chamber declined to bless Andy Burnham as an upgrade on Keir Starmer by roughly two to one against. There was little generational excitement to soften that verdict: the middle-aged, from the mid-40s through the early 60s, were the most resistant of all, while it was men who split closer to even and women who turned against Burnham more decisively, suggesting the doubt cut across the usual Labour coalition rather than sitting neatly on one flank.

The verdict

This one barely divided the chamber at all, which is itself the finding: knighthoods, in the voters' minds, are apparently not conditional on the honouree's honesty about their own life story, only on the law catching up with them. Sir Mo Farah's revelation that he was trafficked as a child and had lied for years about his identity did not, for four in five voters here, amount to the kind of disgrace that has stripped others of their "Sir" — and no age band bucked that consensus. The over-65s were the most unforgiving of all age groups on the question, yet even they landed firmly on the same side as everyone else, suggesting this wasn't generational sympathy so much as a shared sense that deception told to survive trafficking sits in a different moral category to fraud or criminality.

The verdict

Every age band on the platform lined up in near-identical agreement, which is the real signal here: this was not a generational argument but something closer to consensus, with four in five voters across the board judging that trial by media corrupts fair process, on a night when the age split barely moved the number a single point. The gender read cuts differently, and more sharply, than any age gap. Men here backed the "yes" case emphatically, while the small group of women who voted split straight down the middle — suggesting the sexes are simply not reading the same coverage, or not trusting it the same way, when it comes to judging whether the press has replaced the courtroom.

The verdict

The chamber's doubts here were not really about whether Ann Widdecombe's murder fits the legal definition of terrorism, but about whether anyone should take the authorities' word for it — a scepticism that carried No to a clear win, 82 votes to 54.

The verdict

Fatigue rather than division carried this one: four in five voters said the Israel-Gaza debate has crowded out British politics too much, a verdict so broad it barely split by age or sex, though the 55-64s were the most reluctant to say so.

The verdict

The chamber that once carried Farage to Brexit victory now can't agree whether he'll even keep his own job, with a narrow no putting the odds against him lasting the year as Reform leader on 47% support for yes. That the doubt runs thickest among the youngest voters, who broke against him most heavily of any age group, hints at a generational read of Farage less as an insurgent and more as an ageing brand facing internal rivals and a security row of his own making.

The verdict

A chamber that skews older and male, and leans towards suspicion of political money more than most, decided by two to one that Dale Vince's Labour donations look like pay-for-access — with 76 of 110 voters siding against the "just following the rules" defence.

The verdict

Fiscal drag has quietly reclassified a fifth of taxpayers as "higher rate" without a single budget vote raising the rate itself, and the chamber's answer — a clear two-to-one call to lift the £50,270 threshold — reads less like a tax cut demand than a complaint about stealth.

The verdict

A narrow national majority answered yes to a question that treats grievance politics as measurable fact, but the vote's real fracture wasn't about race at all — it was generational, with the under-35s recoiling from the premise that the over-55s embraced almost two to one.

The verdict

Even a chamber willing to entertain the question could not stretch the word treason to cover a prime minister's asylum and border policy, with voters here rejecting the charge by nearly two to one — a verdict less about Starmer's record than about the legal weight of the word being asked to carry.

The verdict

Five to one is not a debate, it is a verdict: on public utilities the chamber sided emphatically with public control, 159 votes to 33, a margin that crosses every generation on the platform.

The verdict

A question built to resist a clean answer got one anyway, with the chamber narrowly agreeing that left-wing activism carries an inherent violent streak, even as the age pattern beneath the six-point margin told a story of generational memory rather than settled fact.

The verdict

This was a verdict delivered in a U-shape rather than a straight line, with the chamber's youngest and oldest voters converging on the same complaint about press power while the middle generations, those who came of political age through the New Labour and coalition years, held back.

The verdict

A narrow but telling No, in a vote timed to the shock of a sitting former minister's murder: this chamber, asked whether violence belongs to one side of politics, mostly answered that it belongs to neither — the margin was eight points, but the fracture beneath it ran through generation and gender far more than through party lines.

The verdict

The chamber delivered a rout rather than a debate, with two in three voters here saying no government has genuinely heeded the concerns raised over three decades of demographic change, immigration and community cohesion.

The verdict

The capital's own devolution settlement survived a scare, with voters rejecting abolition of the GLA and Mayor by a narrower margin than the 44-56 split suggests, given how firmly the youngest Londoners-in-waiting rallied to keep it.

The verdict

The generational split tells the real story here: it was the middle-aged and older who backed the £15bn uplift most firmly, while the youngest voters in the chamber were the only group to reject it outright, a reversal of the usual pattern on defence spending.

The verdict

A question that should split neatly along generational lines about work and rest instead produced a coin-toss, with Yes prevailing by the narrowest of margins on a question that pits the economics of lost output against the politics of a stagnant-wage, longer-working-life workforce.

The verdict

Scrapping the two-child cap failed to find a majority even among a chamber narrowly split down the middle, with the closest thing to consensus being that nobody was terribly sure — the tightest age band, the 45-54s, broke for reform while the largest, the over-55s, dug in hardest against it, no group moving with real conviction either way.

The verdict

The chamber kept the Crown, but only just, and not for any of the reasons a young republican might expect — it was the oldest voters, not the youngest, who tilted most towards abolition, scrambling the usual generational script on inherited institutions.

The verdict

A generational divide did most of the work here: the under-35s backed the idea that flattening inequality strengthens democracy almost two to one, while the 35-54 cohort — squarely in the tax-and-spend middle years — swung the other way, before Yes recovered its lead overall on a 65-47 vote.

The verdict

The chamber came down for keeping the military out of Pride marches, but the age pattern ran backwards from the usual culture-war script: it was the youngest voters who wanted uniforms in the parade, and the middle-aged and older who wanted the forces to stand apart.

The verdict

A system founded on faith in universal, tax-funded care found much of its own base ready to borrow from its continental rivals, with two in three voters here backing a move toward the insurance-style models of France, Germany or Switzerland.