“It's Scotland's oil,” was the refrain of the Scottish National Party when Margo Macdonald started the Nationalist bandwagon rolling in Govan in 1973 and saw the party reach its zenith of 11 Westminster parliamentary seats in 1974.

The discovery of the black gold off Scotland's shores prompted a confidence that the nation could stand on its own two feet.

But a series of posters depicting a pensioner and a baby with the claim “It's her oil, it's his oil”,

struck the wrong note and the SNP's opponents also undermined the economic argument behind relying on a resource which would one day run out.

Fast forward more than thirty years and it is now estimated that there are still 25 billion barrels of oil left in the North Sea, worth about $2 trillion.

Alex Salmond argues that even

a small share of North Sea oil resources carefully invested would create a fund off which the nation could live for evermore.

The irony of a country being one of the world's largest oil producers while its population is forced to pay some of the highest petrol prices in the world is one that the current SNP-led administration at Holyrood is keen to exploit.

By arguing for just 10 per cent of the extra money generated for the UK Treasury the Nationalists are trying to appear reasonable and thereby depict Mr Brown and Mr Darling as entirely unreasonable if they say no.

In recent weeks Mr Salmond appears to have abandoned his habit of picking fights with Westminster on every passing issue amid some polling evidence that voters were becoming irritated by the constant cross-border sniping.

Westminster's failure to stop the EU ending anti-dumping measures which protected the Scottish salmon market from cheap imports passed without a murmur of criticism from the SNP government last week.

But Mr Salmond and Co believe that rising oil prices, which are hitting motorists at the petrol pumps and householders in the shape of soaring energy bills, mean that the decades old cry of “It's Scotland's oil” has a new resonance. It is the battle cry with which he plans to charge into any referendum fight he can stage.

Mr Salmond's opponents will be quick to point out that the public were wary of building an economy on a dwindling resource even in its heyday. Nor will they be slow to argue that in his rush for oil Mr Salmond shouldn't forget the student debt he promised to wipe out, the class sizes he pledged to cut and the public buildings he vowed to create free from private profit.

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