If this lazy, backwards and London-centric industry isn’t willing to change, it should be swept aside.

Sometimes I surprise myself with how in tune with public opinion I am. That might sound pretty arrogant and deluded. It’s just that the way I vote and the feeling I get before elections is nearly always reflected in the result. But funnily enough, my views are hardly ever reflected in the media, and definitely not in the opinion polls.

In the last election it seemed blindingly obvious that Ed Miliband was not viewed by the public as a credible Prime Minister and that, whatever you thought of him, David Cameron did look like someone who could do the role. In fact loads of people I know who had never voted Conservative before did so for the first time in May 2010.

Not just in the months, but in the years building up to the election, I couldn’t see any other outcome than the Conservatives getting the most votes and seats and being the largest party, whether in a hung parliament or a parliamentary majority. Yet the opinion polls had things neck and neck.

This fit pretty well into the narrative of most of the media, which favoured David Cameron, and allowed the Conservatives to eke out every last vote from people fearing an incompetent Ed Miliband as Prime Minister held to ransom by the SNP. All these companies’ excuses about sampling too many younger voters and not enough older voters cover up one simple fact. They did not understand the mood of the public.

Of course everybody makes mistakes and while it’s pretty embarrassing getting the most important part of your job that wrong, the 2015 election wasn’t a reason to write off the polling companies entirely. However, while I won’t pretend to know a huge amount about their industry or their methods, it’s becoming pretty clear to me in the months after the election that they haven’t learned a thing.

The only election there has been since the May 2015 was the Oldham by-election in December, and they got that horribly wrong as well. Anyone could have told them that since UKIP only won one seat in May, they have been seen as bit of a losing horse that people aren’t so keen on backing, yet the polling companies had them almost neck-and-neck with Labour. Add to that that, despite being at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Jeremy Corbyn has taken up much of Nigel Farage’s mantle as the anti-establishment candidate and embodiment of conviction politics and then you wonder how these companies couldn’t see the Labour landslide that occurred in Oldham coming.

Yet they keep going. Now they are predicting a Labour wipeout in May’s local elections. This is strange because what I am seeing is the opposite of May last year. Lots of people who have never voted Labour (and not just from the left) saying they would consider the party because of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s worth adding that I also know a lot of people who absolutely can’t stand Jeremy Corbyn, but they aren’t the type of people that would typically consider Labour in the first place.

This just smacks that something funny is going on. For whatever reason, these polling companies are either too weak or too lazy to stand up to the political and media establishment. We already know that a lot of polling companies in the general election lost their nerve in the final weeks, which makes you think that, for the sake of their credibility, they would now try to stand up to the media narrative.

Yet they have just retreated further into the Westminster bubble. There is no doubt that a slump in the polls for Jeremy Corbyn is what Conservative MPs, and a lot of Labour MPs want to see, but to make out, already, that he is doing far worse than Ed Miliband is just ridiculous.

As I said before, Labour could hardly have picked a candidate less likely to appeal to the country as a whole than Ed Miliband. A few people who voted for Ed Miliband might refuse to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, but nowhere near the cataclysmic levels of voters that Labour’s self-entitled establishment and the polling companies are trying to make out. And this should be easily offset by the amount of young and left-leaning voters who want to be part of the political process all because of Corbyn. Not to mention the amount of voters who just want a leader who rejects name-calling and says what he thinks.

The Conservatives did not have to lift a finger to win the last election. If they are facing Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, they will have to work much much harder.

And as for the polling companies, it’s time for them to realise that the people they are talking to most are people who want information that fits their narrative, rather than the facts. It’s time for them to get out of their London bubble and it’s time for them to sink or swim.