Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a weekly podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Eleanor Langford, and each week I'll be taking an in-depth look at the week's biggest political stories,

with fellow politics home reporters and special guests from across Westminster.

I'm here with our political editor, Adam Payne,

and we're joined by two leading experts in what the public really think of what's going on in government right now.

We have Chris Curtis, head of political polling at Opinion,

and I'm also joined by political scientists Sir John Curtis,

who is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde

and a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. This week, the controversial ride, national insurance, came into

effect, with the government saying that the 500 million raise will be used for a social care

fund. Chris, what sort of reaction have you seen to this issue? Do the public view it as a fair

deal, this national insurance rise? Normally, the answer to that question would be yes.

Usually when you poll on raising national insurance and spending that money on the NHS,

people are fairly supportive of it.

And before this rise came in, that was also true.

I think the difficulty is the fact that everything else is happening at the same time.

So it's not just the fact that people are paying a little bit more on national insurance and that's going to the NHS. It's the

fact that it's happening at the same time as their energy bills are going through the roof, prices

are going up at the pump, inflation's having a massive effect. So it's the sort of compounding effect

of all of those things. So the national insurance rise, in theory, might have been an all right way

to raise money for the NHS, but in practice, I think it's gone down incredibly badly.

And what do you think of that, John? Are you also feeling that this compounding effect is making

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