The year pollsters took a real battering

In the flickering embers of this old year, we can look back at 2016 knowing that its exciting passage left the reputations of pundits and pollsters in shreds. The EU referendum was the ultimate platform for wildly false predictions from an army of “experts”.

Supposedly learned economists, business chiefs, bankers and noisy politicians all forecast that if Britain voted to pull out of Europe, doom and disaster would be the outcome.

Financial and social mayhem awaited. Thousands of job losses were a certainty. Banks and global companies would quit the country, argued the nay-sayers.

Families would be £4,000 worse off, the price of all commodities would rocket, the stock market was set to crash, the Jungle camp of migrants at Calais would transfer to Dover.

Travel restrictions and higher air fares would make holiday travel a nightmare.

And so it went on, the daily dose of spreading fear and anxiety. But this guff was not swallowed by the voting public, especially those who remembered our country pre-eu when we managed quite well as an independent nation.

As for the polls, they were right up the poll, as in last year’s general election, when they got it badly wrong.

One suspects that people are rightly suspicious of these canvassing organisations, and see them as agencies attempting to influence results rather than truthfully reflecting opinion.

The pollsters also took a heavy battering in the American presidential election, where they were well wide of the mark.

The forecasters, too, were left in utter disarray.

Much egg on red faces, yet in the case of the EU decision, the same voices continue to preach disaster and show complete unacceptance of the people’s will by calling for a second referendum on the government’s negotiated deal.

When you hear former prime ministers following such a tack, their commitment to democracy is in serious doubt. None of the guff spouted by the remoaners has happened.

Can we now expect (as in the USA) the minority demonstrating and not acknowledging the electoral result? The young, in particular, have to learn that in life not all decisions go your way.

The one forecast that everyone, polls included, got right was the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader. It was the only foregone conclusion in a year which has seen ruling political elites baffled and bewildered by disruption of their comfort zone.

Stand by for more shocks and upsets in 2017. We are ... living in rapidly changing times ...