This is a quick follow up blog by way of response to Paul Forrest's excellent piece in the current Birmingham Post .
With Scotland's referendum on independence only days away, the polls remain too close to call the outcome even if the Better Together campaign has regained a slight lead.
But whichever way Scotland votes, the result may re-energise the debate around devolution in the rest of the UK, including in English cities and regions.
As I have stressed before in blogs here at the Birmingham Post , radical decentralisation really is required as England remains by far the most centralised state in western Europe even after the current government's programme of so-called 'localism', City Deals and local growth funds.
In part, that's because the scrapping of the old Regional Development Agencies actually recentralised significant power to London rather downwards to Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). And England's cities - Birmingham included - punch well below their weight economically.
A starting point (and only a starting point) for devolution could still be a properly implemented Heseltine Plan. His 2012 'No Stone Unturned' report came up with 89 proposals, with the goal of shifting £60 billion over four years from central government to English regions.
While officially welcoming the report, the Government's response was pretty pathetic, with just a few billions actually devolved, in part because of a ferocious 'Yes Minister' style turf war won by the Treasury which effectively steam-rolled any hope of real decentralisation.
But that Treasury 'win' now surely needs to be revisited, and quickly.
Even if Scotland votes No next week, it will still win a 'Devo-super-max' package of much greater control of resources. That in turn raises the question as to why Scotland - population 5.2 million - can have a very significant degree of autonomy but the West Midlands - population 5.6 million - can't.
The official government line is that English devolution actually started last April when Westminster gave the green light a new 'combined authority' in the North East to pool resources from local authorities to provide a democratic accountability as to how decentralised resources are used.
The North East combined authority followed others in Manchester, Merseyside, West Yorks, and Sheffield.
Of course, things have proved much more difficult here in Birmingham, and here local authorities have so far failed to get their act together. They risk being left behind at the devolution pantomime.
The new combined authorities aim to bring together a mixed-bag of regeneration agencies in each place and may indeed be useful exercises. Yet a number of big challenges risk undermining the project.
One is that, just as combined authorities are being created in the North, dark clouds in the form of whole-scale local authority spending cuts are gathering. The northern city councils, for example, will probably lose 20 per cent of their budgets, on top of what has been cut since 2011.
Secondly, whole areas of the country are left out of the combined authorities - including at the moment cities like Coventry.
The over-riding focus on the northern core cities leaves out areas where LEPs may end up scrapping for resources and foreign direct investment.
So this combined authority model may offer a small step forward but that's all. Rather, at some point a genuinely regional scale will have to be back on the agenda to join up the work of fragmented LEPs. When it does, the lessons from RDAs, both positive and negative, will need to be remembered.
Rebuilding an intermediate or regional scale remains vital so as to join things up - for example in terms cluster and innovation policies across LEPs, to provide monitoring and intelligence, to 'think' strategically at a regional level so as to best use scarce public resources to maximum effect, to act as a conduit for European funding, and to have - at the very last - real control over transport, regional economic development and planning.
For me, the key lesson of the Scotland referendum is that English regions need to be back on the agenda.
Professor David Bailey works at the Aston Business School.
