By George Maher
An Astronomer Royal once said words to the effect of ‘I can tell you where the planet Venus will be on Thursday next at two o’clock in the afternoon but I can not tell you where a paper bag in Oxford Street will be in five minutes time.’ People are more complicated than paper bags and predicting what they will do is usually a loser’s game.
Friedrich Hayek, similarly, warned against the belief that our predictive knowledge in physical science can be applied to human behaviour. In his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, The Pretence of Knowledge, Hayek pointedly argued:
‘I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.’
This is an important caveat. However, there are patterns in human behaviour and discerning those is generally fun and sometimes useful.
Local elections were held earlier this month. The elections were preceded by media speculation and opinion polls but something that had been happening every week since the local elections last held in May 2025 was widely ignored. Council seats fall vacant from time to time for various reasons and by-elections are held to fill the vacancies. These by-elections are almost always held on a Thursday with the results known the following day. Lord Pack compiles and comments on the results of these by-elections every week.
By the end of April 2026 Lord Pack had collated the results of 240 such contests. This is a statistically significant number. It is 5% of the number contested last Thursday when several million people went to the polls. It is equivalent to an opinion poll of several hundred thousand people spread over a twelve month period from wards selected at random. These are each significant contests. The parties who participated in last Thursday’s elections competed in almost all of these seats, fighting with more or less vigour depending on whether the incumbent party could be dislodged or not.
The results of the 240 contests are summarised in the following table, which I shall call a ‘matrix’:
