The NHS crisis is an existential risk for the government

The searing memories of this winter will endure and any action ministers take now will come too late to improve their standing at the next election

Crisis, conflict and collapse have driven the NHS to the top of the political agenda. Every day brings new horror stories from the frontlines of a health service on its knees. Yet there is no evidence of urgency from the government, which seems determined to weather the winter struggle while handing out as little cash as possible to hospitals and staff. They may come to regret this. An unprecedented healthcare crisis poses unprecedented electoral risks on a broad front.

The first of these is already obvious in the daily news rounds, which are now dominated by NHS stories, none of them good for the government. Polling shows rapid rises in the share of voters rating healthcare as an urgent priority. The dangers from this rise in salience are magnified because much of it will be driven by direct experience of a collapsing health system. Changing the focus of the media narrative won’t do much good when hundreds of thousands of voters are seeing the crisis for themselves every day.