These extraordinary financial times have rendered much else in the world mundane and irrelevant. Not least, the concept of Scottish independence. So much so that, suddenly, even the Nationalists are trying to avoid the subject.

Alex Salmond sounded at best half-hearted on radio yesterday when pressed on how an independent Scotland might fare in these cataclysmic economic times.

He was forced to fall back on vague references to independence having sufficient economic levers to deal with such events. Presumably, he meant levers such as having a central bank available to pump sufficient capital into the Scottish banking system to try to ensure continued liquidity.

That would be fine, except that SNP policy is not to have a Scottish central bank, come independence. The Bank of England would continue to be our central bank. And a “Free Scotland” would, therefore, have to go cap in hand to what would then be a foreign country in the hope of getting us out of a hole.

But if Mr Salmond and the SNP are avoiding for the moment the economic nitty gritty of separation from the United Kingdom, that doesn't mean that the Unionist parties in Scotland should be so backward in coming forward.

While one can lay many errors at the doors of Downing Street over its handling of the crisis in recent weeks - and, no doubt, the SNP will - there is one overriding lesson which is inescapable.

Without our membership of the UK and without the funds available from English as well as Scottish taxpayers, the Scottish banking bailout we have just seen would not have been possible.

In other words, thousands of Scots banking and other jobs would have disappeared, the business sector in Scotland would have been cut to the bone and the Scottish economy would have gone into a tailspin.

The notion that has above all fuelled the rise of the independence movement in Scotland is that being a small country on the fringes of Europe was no barrier to joining the economic elite. The UK, we have been told, has run out of steam and by going it alone, we could usher in a golden Scottish economic age.

That notion looks decidedly specious now that the booms in Ireland and Iceland have turned into horrendous busts. Smallness has not given them any advantage. Indeed, one could argue that it has left them more vulnerable to the global waves crashing down on their economic systems. Would an independent Scotland have been a special case? You decide.

But if Iceland and Ireland are not available to the SNP to make the case for independence, there's always Norway. Mr Salmond spoke yesterday about how the Norwegians were able to weather the storm because of their oil fund.

But even the Norwegians have had to take drastic action to shore up their banks in recent weeks - for the second time in two decades. Growth is slowing to a crawl and the country's credit crisis has seen this one-time Nordic leopard calling on the Fed in Washington to buy out $5billion of toxic banking debt.

The SNP government has a point when it says that Britain's oil riches have not been spent in the wisest possible way in the past and that more should have been saved for a rainy day. But that is entirely different from basing a whole economy on a commodity that only a few weeks ago was priced at about $150 a barrel and has now plummeted towards $90 a barrel, with every expectation that it will go even lower as a worldwide recession looms.

In any case, the first purpose of a Scottish oil fund would be to fund the budget deficit that independence would bring.

The Norwegian oil fund has grown only because many billions of kroner have been diverted from revenue spending over the past ten years. That has been possible thanks to some of the highest personal tax rates and fuel prices in the Western world.

Is that really the way Mr Salmond and the SNP want us to go?

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