I reflect from a rural perspective it would put in bold relief how well the Scots do on rural policy. They have a rural parliament, they have a cooperative and more locally focused approach to LEADER, they invest in rural communities and they have a very powerful link between, food, landscape and culture in terms of rural. Their proportion of rural dwellers is on a par with England but their history and landmass mean they take rural more seriously. Or at least I think so. Their national poet, the second best user of our language (barring only Shakespeare) is also the quintessential voice of rural.

Whatever happens next Thursday we have a lot to learn from those North of the border when it comes to rural communities. We should be working more actively across the Solway and Tweed on rural with them and reflecting on the mantra: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Much of the debate about devolution rightly focuses on the prospect of 5.2 million Scots waving goodbye to the UK in a couple of weeks. In the background, away from the fiery spray of words between Edinburgh and London is a debate about how the 53 million people in England could benefit from a bit of devolution themselves.

There are plenty of ideas floating around about how power and influence can be drawn away from London to the regions, and in particular, the bigger cities that create jobs. Birkenhead MP Frank Field argues that moving parliament to Manchester would make a good start. Michael Heseltine, the former Tory minister, presented his views in 2012, calling for a major restructuring of local government and the pooling of £58bn of Whitehall cash for local regeneration projects.

Arguably, English devolution got underway in April when parliament gave its blessing to a north-east combined authority to pool resources from local councils covering Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland. Its creation immediately followed the birth of council clubs covering West Yorkshire, Merseyside and Sheffield and Greater Manchester in 2011.

All these bodies are children of the 2011 Localism Act, which Manchester was almost panting for, but other authorities found more difficult to negotiate given local hostilities.

Each new authority hopes to pull together the rag-bag of regeneration agencies in their area to greater effect, primarily to shake off old allegiances to low-margin, outmoded manufacturing and develop service-oriented economies to rival London.