Labour has managed to publish its report on the party's terrible 2015 election on the same day that the polling organisations have tried to explain why they'd got their Westminster predictions so wrong (except for viewers in Scotland). But neither report offers reassurance that this was a one-off.

There's a joke that's not very funny but illustrates a point. There were two statisticians out hunting when they both spotted the same rabbit. Both statisticians fired at the same time. One missed, firing exactly ten centimetres to the right of the bunny's head. The other also missed as well, firing exactly ten centimetres to the left of it head. The hunting statisticians were happy because, on average, they had killed the rabbit.

For me the same logic is in play when you ask between 1000 and 2000 people how they intend to vote and, by extrapolation and some clever number crunching alchemy, predict the voting intentions of over 45 million registered UK votersⁱ.

There were 92 voting intention polls in the six weeks up to election day last Mayⁱⁱ. Practice did not make perfect as the pollsters predicting a dead heat and the voters delivered the Conservatives a winning margin of 6.5 per cent.

The investigation commissioned by the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society concluded that the sampling was less than perfect and was biased by each pollster paying too much attention to the results that had come before.

Some suggest that polling, like sending statisticians out after rabbits, is harmless. Others say that polls sway outcomes. They certainly can give a false sense of optimism to party leaders (haven't they Mr Kinnock, and your visit to Sheffield on 1st April 1992?).

Of course, in Scotland the predictions of an SNP victory were entirely accurate.

But now we are told the predicted strength of the SNP helped spoil things for Labour – and not just in Scotland.

The Beckett report into Labour's general election outcome says it was not the perception of Labour being "too left wing", too "anti-business", or too "anti-aspiration" that put voters off, but more the fear that the party was about to get too friendly with the SNP.

This explanation has been rejected by the most well-known of psephologists and president of the British Polling Council, Professor John Curtice, who told Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland yesterday morning that this cannot be the explanation as there was no late surge of Tory support coinciding with the Tory's campaigning around this scenario.

Maybe I speak to the wrong people but the most common explanation for the outcome for Labour south of the border is summed up by Ms Beckett as the perceived weakness of Ed Miliband. I went to see him speak on two occasions and found he seemed competent but stage-managed. On TV he came across as a bit strange.

Labour has changed it leader, which certainly deals with Mr Miliband's electoral unattractiveness, though Mr Corbyn is far from guaranteed to be any more to the taste of middle English voters either.

We are now just months away from the Scottish parliamentary election. At the moment the polling organisations do not seem to me to be offering a fundamental change of approach that would make it impossible to get their predictions wrong again in a close race.

However, this time around, the pollsters are not going to be tested. Nobody is predicting a close race.

ⁱRegistered voter numbers

ⁱBBC