Britons are as worried about the NHS as about immigration

EUROPE and the National Health Service are rising up the list of issues that particularly concern British voters, according to our latest opinion poll from Ipsos MORI. Indeed, although immigration still comes top of the list, the NHS is fast closing on it and could yet overtake it. This reflects not just the junior doctors’ strike over seven-day working but broader concerns about NHS funding and lengthening waiting times in hospitals and GP surgeries. Worry over terrorism, voters’ fourth-most pressing concern in the chart, goes up and down depending mostly on news of big terrorist outrages, the latest example being the Brussels bombings on March 22nd.

It is not surprising that Europe should have risen sharply as an issue since David Cameron, the prime minister, called his referendum on European Union membership for June 23rd. The problem for Mr Cameron as the referendum approaches is not that Europe has moved up the list of voters’ biggest concerns. It is that campaigners to leave the EU seek to link worries over immigration, terrorism and even the NHS to the Brexit cause. Hence their latest claim that they would use money saved from lower EU budget contributions to bolster the health service. Although most recent polls show an increasing lead for the campaign to remain, the battle is by no means over.