What's worrying the People?

Delivery, delivery, delivery. The performance of the Government on improving public services is now seen as the litmus test that will determine its long-term future, and the Chancellor's spending announcements this week are confirmation, if any were needed, that it is their success in this field on which the Blair administration expects to stand or fall.

This, of course, for the most part reflects the public's main concerns. The health service, education, crime and public transport are currently four of the leading five items on the monthly list of important issues facing Britain in the MORI Political Monitor survey. The public's responses are unprompted, and give us a good indication of what they feel at a particular time, conditioned of course by what they experience as they go about their lives, and by what they read, see and hear in the media.

But since public services are always important, won't they always head the list, regardless of their importance in the government's political programme? Well, no. They are always there in the background, of course; if we look back, five years, or ten years, public concerns about the NHS, education/schools and crime/law & order are always prominent. They were there among the top six issues in June 1992. They were there after the 1997 general election. And they are still there today. These public priorities are unlikely to change.

But so often a government is faced with some other crisis or crises that alter the public's priorities completely. Sometimes, it is the handling of these other issues that will ultimately determine a government's fate; sometimes not. Let us cast our minds back 10 years. What were the issues facing Britain that summer? In June 1992, John Major's government, under the constraints of a very slim majority, was still in its brief post-election "honeymoon". Unemployment was the single most important issue facing Britain, highlighted by 57% of our respondents.

Yet unemployment barely featured as an issue when that government stood for a further term and went down to a resounding defeat. Within a month the serious papers would be full of the Danes voting "Nej" to Maastricht, and the tabloids full of salacious stories about David Mellor; Black Wednesday in September completed the misery that sent the Tories' poll ratings tumbling. But who in June would have predicted the issues that would cause so much trouble?

Today, unemployment barely squeezes into the top ten on our list, mentioned by just 10%. Similarly, the state of the economy generally was in third place in 1992, on 26%; now that figure stands at 9%, in 11th place.

The Public Pulse

Q What would you say are the most important issues facing Britain? (Unprompted: top seven responses)

Nevertheless, the economy, like public services, is always of importance, even if an ungrateful public tends to forget it when things are going well. Other issues can have a more transitory stay in the upper reaches of the issues table, either propelled to prominence in the public mind by particular events or simply becoming the fashionable topic of concern and conversation and, just as abruptly, fading again.

Last year, of course, international events, defence and terrorism were for a few months the immediate top-of-the-mind concerns of the majority of the public; but the imminence of those concerns receded, and only 13% mentioned defence or foreign affairs as an important issue in June. The major change we have seen in the last couple of months is increased public concern about race relations and immigration: as recently as April, the proportion mentioning these issues stood at 13%. This rose sharply in May (to 39%). Although it has fallen somewhat in June (to 32%), these figures are running at a historically high level. Whether this will continue as a strong theme in the public's mind over the medium term or fall away remains to be seen.

Looking back again ten years reminds us of how an issue can slip quietly off the agenda. In June 1992, the environment and pollution occupied 7th place on the list, a concern of 15% of the public; a couple of years earlier, for one month in 1989, it was the single most cited important issue, named by 35%. Yet today, only 4% think to mention it. Almost all the public still claim, when specifically asked about it, to be concerned about environmental issues. (See our recent surveys for the Scientific Alliance and the New Opportunities Fund.) But it is no longer one of the things keeping them awake at night.

In the same way, fifteen years ago nuclear weapons and disarmament were usually in the top three or four issues of concern; and back in 1979 and 1980 strikes and trade unions headed the list. Both are now issues rarely mentioned by our respondents; but, as the crisis over Kashmir and this week's strike action in public services and on the London Underground have reminded us, either might easily in certain circumstances suddenly become, again, issues of the greatest concern to the public, transcending other problems which seem urgent now but which events might make seem an irrelevance.

Public services are the public's priority at the moment, and meeting their expectations will be vital to the government's long-term future - probably. But, as Harold Macmillan famously said, it is "events, dear boy, events" that can sink governments. Who can tell what new problem may be facing the country next year, or even next month?

Simon Atkinson Roger Mortimore