Anyone in Glenrothes watching Gordon Brown's big speech yesterday might have been excused for wondering what it had to do with them. Granted there were touches of the well-worn pulpit-thumping Brown style familiar to all Scots, but equally there were large swaths of the speech, on crime and health policy for example, which, because of devolution, had absolutely no relevance to the good citizens of the Fife town or anywhere else north of the Border.

Free universal check-ups for the over-40s? Extension of nursery places? No prescription charges for cancer patients? A commissioner for victims of crime? More children connected to the internet? All England and Wales only, I'm afraid.

It was a speech that underlined just how wide the domestic policy divide between Scotland and England is nowadays, especially when the party in charge in Edinburgh is different from the government in London.

Whereas Scots already have cheaper prescriptions for all, England gets free prescriptions for cancer patients in a year's time. While Scotland already has free personal care of the elderly, England, the Prime Minister pledged, is to get more financial protection for the vulnerable elderly.

The only policy initiatives mentioned by Brown yesterday that could truly be said to be UK-wide was his promised future restoration of the link between state pensions and earnings and his never-ending fight against child poverty.

On flexible opening of GPs' surgeries and new targets for curbing carbon emissions, Brown is actually catching up with the SNP administration at Holyrood.

Indeed, this very Scottish Prime Minister, apart from one glancing reference, hardly mentioned Scotland at all. He also completely ignored Alex Salmond and the SNP as if they didn't exist. Unfortunately for him, they do - and right now only the most optimistic Labour fan of Brown would bet against the Nationalists inflicting another crushing and possibly politically terminal by-election defeat on both him and Labour in a Scottish by-election in a few weeks' time.

Having said that, there were many in Labour in Scotland who will feel uplifted by Brown's rhetoric and his sermon on “fairness”. It could hardly be otherwise, perhaps. Morale in Labour north of the Border is on the floor. But the “new settlement for new times” theme of the speech will be a difficult message to sell in Glenrothes after 11 years of a Labour Government dominated by Brown and Blair, when the big issues remain food and fuel bills.

These Labour troops in Scotland will have been thrilled as much as activists in England by Brown's assault on David Cameron and the Tories. The trouble is that north of the Border, Cameron's Tories are little more than also-rans.

Nor was there any specific mention of the travails of HBOS, a strange miss given that Brown, by at last ditching his dithering last week and taking decisive action to override competition rules, could make a fair case for having saved the day for the bank. Maybe he's keeping that for a rainy day in Glenrothes. Of course, that's if he decides to go there and campaign, as an increasing number in his party in Scotland believe he must.

A failure to do so would be seen not only by his own party but also by the wider Scottish public as a complete failure of leadership from a Prime Minister who only yesterday told us that he was the right person to lead Britain through the present economic jungle. It would be a Godsend for the Nationalists who could start contemplating the size of their majority. Prime ministerial convention that the office-holder does not get his hands dirty in a by-election campaign is one thing. Prime ministerial survival is quite another. Absence will not make the hearts of Glenrothes voters grow fonder of Brown.

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