This must be a heartening week for those wallowing in self-pity. Suddenly everyone seems to care how happy we are. Just as a campaign was launched yesterday to dissuade urban elderly people from retiring to the countryside, lest among other horrors they find themselves with neighbours resembling a cross between Nick Griffin and Margo Leadbetter, the Office for National Statistics also published a comprehensive report on who the happiest people in Britain are, and where they live.

Without taking income into account, the survey posed questions such as: "How happy did you feel yesterday?", cueing up data of the bleeding obvious, such as those from ethnic minorities – where income and opportunity is still limited by prejudice – enjoying less happiness than their white counterparts, and that middle-aged men are anxious.

However, who would have guessed that those in England and Wales lag behind the happy-go-lucky, bon vivant, go-getters that joyously populate Scotland and Northern Ireland? Having just returned from a routine trip to a supermarket in Glasgow, where staff and customers alike regularly sport the appearance of people told they've been drafted into the Foreign Legion, this naturally comes as something of a surprise.

Unfortunately the survey tells us only the respondents' own assessment of their happiness, but not why they feel it. Just as there is no scientific unit with which to measure human pain, since suffering is subjective, there is equally none to measure genuine contentment, and there can be few blunter instruments for understanding the complexity of emotions than government surveys.

Tempting though it is, it would be churlish to mock it prematurely. Although David Cameron's agenda for setting up the government's Measuring National Wellbeing programme in 2010 might be open to suspicion, coming as it did six months after winning an election to govern a country facing years of fiscal misery, it's still worth hoping the final results are not skewed for political gain. The real roots of happiness, those of having a sense of purpose and worth, of being loved, respected and personally fulfilled, should all be potentially attainable goals regardless of geography or circumstance.

Since contentment has demonstrable effects on health, social behaviour and community as a whole, the important response to the data should most properly be to devise practical ways to provide that peace of mind across as wide a demographic as possible.

Depressingly, it would be something of an understatement to point out that so far the government's record on that score is not exactly inspiring. Euphoria is not commonly induced by threatening healthcare, increasing joblessness, inflaming religious and racial tensions, participating in illegal wars, covering up corrupt policing, bankrolling fat cat buddies and dumbing down education.

If there is anywhere that anxiety should be measurable it should be at Westminster, where the task that needs to be done to make us all happier before the survey completes is becoming Herculean.

But then what do we know in the north? We're too damn occupied dancing and laughing in the streets while wreathing each other in daisy chains to notice Britain being bludgeoned slowly to death.

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