THE first issues index of 2015 from Ipsos MORI, which measures what British voters are worrying about, shows that the National Health Service has replaced immigration as their main concern. The reason for this is the accident-and-emergency crisis in hospitals over the Christmas period. The 12-point jump in the proportion of respondents who said health policy was their greatest anxiety suggests that the Labour Party made the right diagnosis when it decided to kick off its election campaign by focusing on health.

Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader, has looked increasingly satisfied at the dispatch box in Parliament as David Cameron, the prime minister, has squirmed over health policy.

The Tories’ own decision to focus on the economy is not entirely misplaced, however, as a third of voters still worry about it, despite robust GDP growth of more than 2.5%. But people tend to vote on what they experience, see and read, rather than what politicians say. The Tories risk looking out of touch by banging on about the economy while newspapers are filled with pictures of patients on trolleys and ambulances backed up outside A&E departments. Indeed, it is a particular danger to the Conservatives, whose traditional supporters are

comparatively older and wealthier, and fret more about the NHS than their poorer peers: 54% of Tory supporters say it is their main worry, a staggering 22-point increase in one month. Moreover, the government’s much-criticised top-down reorganisation of the health service has been described as “disastrous” by the King’s Fund, a think-tank, in a report released on February 6th. It says that the first three years of the coalition's health reforms were wasted, adding to the financial strain on the NHS and leaving a strategic vacuum. That said, Mr Cameron may take some heart from the King’s Fund’s dismissal of claims that the health service is undergoing a mass privatisation as “exaggerated". He may also be comforted by the fact that the state of the NHS is a perennial worry for the public, which is never satisfied, no matter which party is in power. The proportion of voters who said they were worried about the NHS reached a high of 72% under Labour in 2002.