Healthy, Wealthy And Wise

Ed Miliband was right to list the NHS among the great achievements of the United Kingdom as such.

But in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they still get to live somewhere that it is recognisably Britain, whereas in England we are the guinea pigs in the never-ending crazy experiments of the think tank schoolboys, suiting only too horrifically the outright crookery of Andrew Lansley in the service of his paymasters, the American healthcare profiteers whom Obama is forcing to find new victims beyond their own shores.

How does Scotland or Wales (Northern Ireland less so, I expect) feel about the growing likelihood, and indeed the growing reality, of much of the population being made up of people who have retired there from England in order to live out their days in something resembling the Britain in which they grew up, with the costs duly met by Her Majesty's Exchequer in London?

Lots of useful spending power. But a significant change in the character of society, in both class and age terms. And hardly a boon for the separatist cause. Might not Alex Salmond prefer the independence referendum to be held next week after all, before even more of them have headed north?