Those flagpoles that were left over from the Tour de France have been put to good use by flying the White Rose for Yorkshire Day on Friday.

The county has a population of just over five million and a sense of identity as strong as Sheffield steel, as tasty as Theakston bitter and as bonding as a week in Bridlington sunshine.

So I was interested in a BBC report that said several regions in Europe were agitating for independence: Catalonia and the Basque regions of Spain; Flanders, where the Dutch speakers of Belgium want autonomy from the French speaking south: Veneto, with Venice as its capital, and Padania, in Italy; Brittany and Corsica in France.

Scotland will, of course, be voting on independence in September. They have a population the size of Yorkshire. Could God’s Own County be next?

Would the Republic of Yorkshire be a viable proposition?