Alex Salmond took the growing argument about Scotland’s constitutional future to the door of No 10 Downing Street yesterday, telling Gordon Brown that Labour’s historical dominance of the country was over and that more and more Scots were becoming convinced of the case for independence. The First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party signalled his determination to exploit what he sees as the Prime Minister’s relative political weakness after the decision to pull back from a general election this year.

Mr Salmond has decided, sources say, that now is a good time to up the ante and begin a strident campaign to convince Scots that they would be better off going it alone. In evidence, he will point to what the Nationalists claim is the worst spending settlement for Scotland since devolution, and the recent spat over the alleged withdrawal of cash aid from London to beleaguered Scottish livestock farmers after the foot-and-mouth outbreak south of the Border.

In his opening remarks yesterday to the SNP’s annual conference, the party’s first since winning power at Holyrood, Mr Salmond said that Mr Brown and Labour had not just lost an election in Scotland last May but had also lost touch with Scots.

“The historical dominance and political allegiance in Scotland for Labour is now well and truly over. We are changing and witnessing major advances in the nature of Scottish politics,” he told the conference.

The First Minister, who received a standing ovation from activists as he entered the hall, even though his main conference speech is not until tomorrow afternoon, went on to claim Mr Brown’s Government would try to make life difficult for the SNP minority Executive in Edinburgh. He said: “I don’t think they are sitting round the Cabinet table and cheering us on.”

The recent Comprehensive Spending Review allocation for Scotland from Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, was, Mr Salmond said, “extremely bad” and amounted to an argument for independence and responsibility in Scotland. He said: “People will look askance at the budget squeeze on Scotland when this morning’s price of Brent crude is $86 a barrel, heading towards three figures, and the revenues from Scotland’s North Sea resources flood into the Chancellor’s coffers even as he squeezes the Scottish budget over the next three years.”

Mr Salmond’s remarks could be seen as softening up the Scottish public for some disappointments when the SNP presents its budget for the next three years on November 14 at Holyrood. It is looking increasingly likely that some big Nationalist election manifesto commitments, such as the abolition of student debt and cuts in primary class sizes, may have to be, at the very least, watered down. Mr Salmond is hoping that his almost daily criticisms of the amount that Mr Darling set aside for Scotland will convince Scots that a failure to deliver is not the fault of the SNP.

Meanwhile, John Swinney, the Finance Secretary, took his cue from Mr Salmond and used his conference speech to claim that Mr Brown’s Government was making the case for Scottish independence by giving the country the “tightest financial settlement” in years. He told delegates that the real terms increase in next year’s Scottish budget was 0.5 per cent, against 11 per cent real terms increases in recent years. Mr Swinney said: “If I did not know them all as well as I do, I would have thought the UK Government’s spending review and the budget report produced by the UK Treasury ministers were an eloquent attempt by the UK Treasury to make the case for Scottish independence.

“If there was ever a case for Scotland to be in full charge of our own revenues and our own spending, then the UK spending review we have just heard makes the case better than any single one of us could ever have made in our political lives.”

However, Mr Swinney’s estimate of what the spending deal means for Scotland are bitterly contested by Labour, which says that the average increase over three years is 1.8 per cent. Labour also points to studies by indepndent economists which have said that Scotland has got exactly the amount of cash to which it was entitled and that the squeeze is no tighter in Scotland than in other parts of the UK.

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