THIS ill-tempered, promiscuously focused election should be about the economy—and if the Conservatives pull off the win that their ratings on the issue seem to warrant, it may yet be. But future historians may prefer to recall the existential questions that accumulated in the campaign, little-noticed, like toxic mercury in a dolphin’s liver. Who wants to be British? What is Britain for? They will certainly marvel at a massacre of Scottish unionist MPs at the hands of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) which, assuming the polls are even half-right, is about to leave Britain’s 300-year-old, once swaggeringly successful, union of nations looking desperately enfeebled.

Politicians on all sides are talking on that theme but, a week before a general election, with such fevered partiality that the real issue of Britain’s future is being warped or ignored. The Conservatives, discreetly revelling in Schadenfreude, warn that Labour will be able to form a government only with support from a party dedicated to dismembering Britain. That is probably true. The SNP looks likely to become Britain’s third biggest party, with over 40 seats. And that would not be, as some in Labour mystifyingly imply, somehow the Tories’ fault for fulminating on the issue, thus driving Scots into the nationalists’ embrace. Yet nor, as Labour counters, would it make Scots much likelier to hive off than they were last September, when they voted by 55% to 45% to keep the union. And it would not in any way be “illegitimate”, as Theresa May, a senior Tory, argued this week, for Labour to use the SNP’s support to sustain a government.

Opinion polls suggest there has in fact been no post-referendum surge in support for Scottish independence. That the SNP may be about to win twice as many votes as it did in 2010 is because most of the Scottish Labour voters who plumped for independence in September are sticking with the party that promises it. That this will improve the nationalists’ fortunes absurdly—with only 4% of the national vote, they may have 8% of seats in Parliament—reflects the unfair workings of the first-past-the-post electoral system, which both Labour and the Tories love. For Labour to take advantage of this would not be illegitimate, but simply a reflection of British democracy.

Nor even would the SNP, in or near power, be able to carry out quite the wrecking job David Cameron, the Tory prime minister, predicts for it. Ridding Scotland of the Tories was the main slogan of the independence campaign and remains the SNP’s battle-cry. The “Nats” could make havoc for a Labour government, but they would almost certainly not bring it down. The last time they did that, in 1979, they annoyed their leftist followers mightily.

All the same, the union is in a desperately poor state. Already, the SNP is mainly concerned about next year’s Scottish Parliament elections: specifically over whether to promise a second independence referendum in its manifesto. It might not, because even if it could deliver another plebiscite the polls suggest the result would probably be the same. Yet while they rid Scotland of unionist rivals, and most Scots under the age of 50 are believed to want independence, the nationalists can afford to be patient. Almost half of Britons, according to this week’s YouGov poll for The Economist, think Scotland will be independent in 20 years’ time; the evidence of Scottish opinion suggests they may be right.

And Scotland is not the only malcontent. Bagehot’s travels around Britain during this campaign have thrown up a dismal litany of nationalist and regionalist complaint. In Belfast, he heard middle-class Catholics—who would have recoiled from Republican violence during the Troubles—declare their support for the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, whose terrorist wing, the IRA, carried out those killings. In Cardiff, Leanne Wood, leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, and a minor star in this campaign, described her plausible ambition to ape the SNP’s success by dropping the cultural nationalism that long restricted Plaid to a few Welsh-speaking counties and embracing the left-wing Utopianism that has fuelled the SNP. In sunny Kent your columnist sat in a pub festooned with St George’s flags listening to Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, outline “patriotic” policies that were not written to gladden Celts: UKIP wants no more “English taxpayers’ money [to be] shovelled over Hadrian’s wall…the English need a fairer deal.”

Merry England, Great Britain

Britain has never been in such an all-round querulous state. And if some of this wrestling is inspired by the Scottish Nats, it has a common source. British identity is not nearly as old as, and has never been as strong as, the identities of its constituent parts. England predates the Act of Union that bound Scotland to England and Wales by almost a thousand years. No wonder Mr Farage’s demand to make St George’s Day a public holiday is popular.

By contrast, British identity is how Britons have tended to dress up for the world—to unite in their common defence, to build an empire, to assert their shared values. It is, again, no wonder this is wilting as British power declines. But, properly understood and argued for, Britain is no less valuable than it ever was. If England, Scotland and the rest retain any ambition to have a say in the world, culturally and commercially if to a diminishing extent militarily, Britain is their beautifully appointed tool. It is a ready-made means to pool security and other risks. And it will remain, as it always has been, a comfort blanket against the intemperate nationalism to which Britons, almost uniquely among their European peers, and for this reason, have remained stolidly immune.

It is no accident the United Kingdom has prospered: all its parts gain from it, all would be poorer alone. And if unionist politicians cannot clinch that argument, against the populists and the disaffected, they had better move aside to let others try. The impending defeat of Scottish unionists will at least provide that opportunity. But that is a pale light in a bleak and stormy sky.