And now, bouncing on to the Referendum pitch, the arrival of welfare policy as the latest political football to be kicked around.

For the Yes team, the timing wasn't great. The independent panel set up to look at the technicalities of separating the Scottish welfare system from that of the rest of the UK published its report, advising lead minister Nicola Sturgeon that a two-year transitional period was advised to protect services.

But it did so in the week that the disabled community began its enforced move from disability living allowance to personal independence plan, a device widely believed to involve another deeply flawed assessment process and driven by a determination to cut the benefits bill further, rather than in response to need.

So cue both the No camp and the voluntary sector variously querying the point of breaking up a system without a forward plan, or voicing disappointment at the lack of a post 2014 blueprint.

In truth both are barking up the wrong tree. The small group set up at the beginning of the year to look at welfare in a post independence Scotland had a remit to look at the technicalities of setting up a self standing system, not one to design new policy or comment on the current ones.

And here, as ever, is where the raw politics of the equation do not aid clarity of thought. One of the now-familiar scare stories flagged up around welfare and pensions has been that payment could be chaotic if Scotland takes over the administration of them.

And doubtless the Scottish Government, anxious not to frighten any more horses, accepted the advice to plump for transition planning rather than risk what the panel determined was a "high risk" strategy of going for the big bang on day one. In truth, the way we receive these payments is nothing if not messy in the geographical sense.

There are rafts of Scots whose entitlements are calculated and authorised south of the Border, and English claimants and pensioners on the books in Scotland. Seen from that perspective, a 24-month tidying-up process seems only prudent.

Nevertheless questions about the type of welfare state we aspire to as well as its logistics need to be addressed just as urgently. The UK minister responsible for Iain Duncan Smith's cuts crusade is regularly wheeled out to say the sums involved are rising and not sustainable. The logic of this escapes me. If you have 10 people in a queue for allowances to help them live independent lives, all with the same level of need and incapacity, do you tell the last three that, sorry, you've run out of cash?

When social security was set up the phrase meant just that, security for the citizen when circumstances left them and their families in need of a safety net. In the Duncan Smith new world order this has morphed into a grotesque lottery where people have to jump through ever more elaborate hoops to receive ever more inadequate levels of support.

I was reminded by a friend at the sharpest end of the voluntary sector this week that even in Ireland, no stranger to economic downturn, people on unemployment benefits were given an added 50 euros in exchange for work in their community. Rather more forward thinking, he suggested, than being obliged to tramp the streets for 35 hours a week in search of non existent jobs.

And here lies the nub of the argument. The old adage, to govern is to choose, will be writ large over government policy, whoever is in power in Holyrood come 2016, the first election after the referendum. That government will not be able to magic up funds to create a fairer more secure society, but it will be able to make choices about how it deploys its income.

For an obvious example I doubt if you could locate more than a handful of MSPs of any political shade in Holyrood who think that it makes sense to commit huge tranches of a Scottish exchequer to paying for son of Trident.

Yet welfare is not just about hard cash. The direction of travel pursued by the Westminster Coalition has helped construct a mindset where terms such as "scrounger" and "something for nothing society" have become a dispiriting feature of the debate.

We are entering a period where the full force of the benefit cuts will become only too apparent. We already live in a world where food banks, once an occasional resource for the desperate, are springing up all over the country, and being accessed by families who never dreamt the brave new 21st century would be one in which they couldn't afford to feed their own kids.

Still to come in this relentless war on the poor will be the spectre of disabled people once more trapped behind their own doors rather than being given enough to give them a measure of independence, a modicum of dignity, and the chance to remain a productive citizen rather than a passive recipient.

And once more those people determining the future of an already disadvantaged cohort of Scots will be the private sector clipboard army whose main area of expertise appears to lie in delivering the "correct" level of budget cuts.

That is not a world a modern nation should aspire to inhabit which is why the debate over welfare is a crucial one, one that is deserving of serious examination rather than campaign soundbites.

The mantra should never be how much money we can shake out of the system, but how we can construct one predicated on offering the maximum opportunity to belong and contribute in an equitable society.

I once got a cheap laugh at a conference by reminding the audience that the premises used by ATOS in Glasgow to determine who was fit to work was known locally as Lourdes, since the sick and disabled went in one door in that condition, and came out another, miraculously cured and deemed workforce ready.

It doesn't seem that funny any more.