Richard. Obviously not. The reason why our hospitals are so close to collapse has nothing to do with the Bulgarian hordes who haven't come here yet, but with the fact that the NHS has been consistently starved of funds for near enough the past forty years.

And yes, I know a lot of the blame for that lies on Thatcher's doorstep, but cut backs and economies go back further, at least to the days of the Callaghan government, and they continued unremitting under Blair.

I spent a couple of nights in hospital recently and I can't say I saw any Bulgarian patients in there, or indeed any patients of non-British ethnicity.

What I did see was a lot of doctors, nurses, cleaning staff etc;, running round like blue arsed flies, and unable to pay proper attention to the patients, because they had a workload which was out of all proportion to their numbers. Beyond the fact that quite a few of them were "immigrants", the "numbers coming here" argument does not apply in this case.

When the last A&E department has closed, when the last hospital has collapsed for lack of maintenance, and when the last patient has died through neglect, only then will governments realise that you can't get blood out of a stone, and you can't run the NHS on a shoe string.