SECURING adequate resources to back a new Scottish currency will be critical.

In this context, the question of compensation for the oil revenues which were effectively misappropriated by Westminster has to be addressed.

Calculations given to the Finance Committee in 2014 indicate just how substantial this level of misappropriation actually was.

READ MORE: Scotland should be compensated for 'squandered' oil revenues

Suppose, for example, that in 1980 an independent Scotland had taken over its population share of UK debt.

Suppose that Scotland subsequently maintained the same level of expenditure on domestic services like health, education, social security, et cetera that actually took place.

The National:

Suppose also that Scotland fully met expenditures attributed to it in GERS on all the non-identifiable expenditure items, with the exception of interest payments on UK debt incurred after 1980 – so, for example, this would imply that Scotland spent over 2% of its GDP on defence, which looks unlikely.

Then if Scotland had earned a fairly modest return on its surplus balances equivalent to the UK gilt interest rate, Scotland would have been in possession of an oil fund comfortably in excess of £100 billion.

In fact, this estimate is conservative, given, for example, that an independent Scotland is unlikely to have adopted as generous a taxation policy on oil revenues as the UK Government did: nor to have spent as big a proportion of its GDP on defence.

Given the scale of the resources which have been misappropriated, the argument that is sometimes put forward, that the past is the past, and we should not raise the issue of adequate compensation, seems surprising.

Indeed, it gives quite the wrong signal.

If we are willing to put up with this scale of expropriation with hardly a murmur, is there any injustice we will not meekly acquiesce to.