As the winter Scottish political news drought enters its 17th week, mainstream and alternative media commentators alike are scratching around desperately for anything to write about, which tends to end up in overlong reflective and/or hectoring essays about how to secure independence, invariably concluding that what we need is for everyone in Scotland to start thinking and acting exactly like the author of the article.

We’re going to aim for something a bit shorter and more practical, at least.

Support for independence currently stands pretty stable around the mid-40-percents, as it has done give or take a few points since the 2014 referendum. Arithmetically-alert readers will note this means around 55% of voters would still vote to stay in the UK.

But who are they? Here’s a brief guide.

(PLEASE NOTE: THE FOLLOWING DEALS IN BROAD GENERALISATIONS. IT DOES NOT REFER TO EVERY LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THESE GROUPS. WELL, EXCEPT THE FIRST ONE.

1. God Save The Queeners

We did some polling in 2016 to find out how many people would never vote for independence under any circumstances, even if a nuclear accident turned the whole of England, Wales and Northern Ireland into a radioactive zombie-infested wasteland with nothing on TV except Celebrity Juice.

The figure, pretty much in line with our prior guesstimate, was 30%. These people are hopeless cases. You will only wrench the Union Jack out of their cold, dead fingers. Every leaflet put through their letterbox, every minute spent debating with them on the doorstep or online, is a pointless waste of time and resources.

If a genie were to grant us just a solitary boon over the Yes movement, it would be “STOP PEOPLE ARGUING WITH ULTRA-YOONS”.

How do we win them round? We don’t. We walk away and use the time to do something productive instead.

2. Pensioners

If only under-60s voted, Scotland would be independent already. But the elderly – and again, see the disclaimer above this list – are the political elephant in the room of not only Scotland but the entire UK.

By a hugely disproportionate margin they’re Unionist, Tory and pro-Brexit, and they have little else to do all day but make sure that they go out and vote in order to frustrate the dreams of their children and grandchildren. They WILL turn out, in person or by post, and they WILL do everything they can to prevent any kind of change, in Scotland as everywhere else. They like things the way they are, even when the way they are is terrible.

How do we win them round? There are probably very limited gains to be made here too. “Better Together” was pushing at an open door when it convinced them independence would cost them their pension, no matter how many times it was categorically proven it wouldn’t, and no matter how often it was pointed out that the UK’s pensions are just about the worst in the civilised world.

Pensioners voted overwhelmingly Conservative as usual in 2017 even after the Tories proposed a whole series of policies that would directly hurt them, and despite stuff like this:

If that didn’t put them off, we can’t think what would. So there probably isn’t much hope of making a serious dent in the grey vote any time soon.

3. Naive Corbyn groupies on the middle-class “radical” left

We’ve had some frustrating Twitter debates with independence supporters who voted “for Jeremy Corbyn” last year, even though they were actually voting for a local Scottish Labour candidate standing on a platform of implacable opposition to independence/the SNP and not much else.

We’ve tried patiently and politely, but always in vain, to get them to explain how a Scottish Labour MP could ever be better from the perspective of a left-leaning Yes voter than an SNP one. Both would vote to make Corbyn PM, but the Labour one would also vote for Trident and against a second indyref, and couldn’t be relied on to vote against austerity and welfare cuts.

But even if you assume that Corbyn (a) could ever win an election, and (b) would genuinely attempt to pursue a revolutionary socialist agenda in power, he’s 69 years old. By the time another UK election is due he’ll be 73 and if he somehow survived his enemies in his own party and made it to the end of a full term he’d be 78. And then what?

Measured over any substantial period, regardless of political trends, the UK votes Conservative almost two-thirds of the time. Labour had a majority government for just 19 years of the entire 20th Century. Even if Corbyn wins – and not many people think there’s any chance of that – the UK’s natural state of Tory rule would reassert itself soon enough.

(Even faced with the most stupendously, obviously hapless and incompetent UK Prime Minister in living memory Corbyn can’t manage to get ahead in the polls that consistently tell us more about who’ll win an election than any other – the ones about who people think would make the best PM.)

How do we win them round? It’s easy to see why at best, a Labour government under Corbyn would be a brief respite from the Tories, not a permanent solution. (And faced with Civil Service obstruction and Labour infighting it would probably achieve very little in however much time it had.)

But in our experience pro-indy Labour voters just go “LA LA LA LA LA” and stick their fingers in their ears no matter how gently you point this out, so any that have been lost are probably going to stay lost for the forseeable future.

4. Yes Leavers

Now, though, we’re getting somewhere. The seemingly unchanging nature of polling for independence conceals a much more interesting reality: in fact almost a third of Scots have changed their minds on the subject since 2014.

More than a quarter of No voters have switched sides on account of Brexit, but around a third of Yes voters have gone the other way, leaving the overall Yes/No numbers practically identical. If everyone who voted Yes in 2014 had stayed onside, we’d now be around 20 points ahead in the polls and independence would be all but politically unstoppable.

And since we know these people have voted Yes once already, we know they might do it again. As such, they represent the independence movement’s best chance by far of actually winning a second referendum.

How do we win them round? It’s very tempting just to be angry at Yes Leavers. While there’s a perfectly respectable argument to be made for leaving the EU (albeit one that’s currently disintegrating by the day), prioritising it over independence for Scotland if you want both of those things is simply logically irrational – for a whole slew of really obvious reasons, the chances of winning a second indyref from outside the EU are basically nil.

So you could just try to get people to see that. But a much better line of reasoning – which has the very considerable merits of being both true and transparent – is to say that the smart move with regard to leaving the EU is to let someone else be the guinea pig.

Because unlike the other way round, independence doesn’t make leaving the EU any more difficult. If Scotland votes for independence in the EU while the rest of the UK leaves, we get to watch and see how it works out for them before we make our own minds up about it.

If it all goes brilliantly – which seems unlikely now, but who knows? – then Yes Leavers can reasonably feel that they could win a subsequent Scottish Leave vote. After all, they’d be starting from a base of 38%, which is much better than the independence campaign started on in 2011.

If you want both independence and out of the EU, it’s possible to have both – but not if you leave the EU first. And if you go for indy first, you get to make the EU decision on a vastly better-informed basis than the UK did in 2016. It’s a win-win.

Some won’t like that idea. But at the end of the day, you don’t appeal to people by telling them they’re wrong, or idiots, or racists. (And you also, just by-the-by, don’t do it by handing control of your movement to people whose political history demonstrates that they couldn’t win a vote to be a nursery teacher if they were the only one who turned up to the interview with any trousers on.)

You win by showing people that what you’re proposing is the best way to get the things THEY want. Pitching EU membership as just another thing Scotland would get to decide for itself as an independent nation is the ONLY way of preserving it, but paradoxically is also a much better way of leaving the EU than just handcuffing yourself to the UK as it leaps out of an aeroplane blindfolded and wearing what might be a parachute or might be a satchel full of bricks.

Options, like time, are running out fast. We should probably focus.