Last week we revealed that English voters would happily see Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK if it was the price of securing Brexit. But one of the odder things was that those figures included a sizeable number of Remain voters, who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.

We were a little perplexed, so we did a follow-up question asking those people if they’d elaborate a bit and got some interesting replies. One person, for example, answered “The Scottish people are very arrogant and although they want to be separate from the rest of the UK they are happy to take money from England”. Charming.

But there was also another stream of opinion on the subject, and it was revealed in the responses to another question in the original poll.

Because one of the Remain voters happy to let Scotland go also said this:

“To allow a choice – seriously thinking of moving to Scotland.”

And it turned out they were far from alone.

Because no fewer than 12% of English voters said they’d definitely consider moving to an independent Scotland that was a member of the EU, with another 11% not sure. And those might not sound like huge numbers, until you do the arithmetic.

Population of England: 53 million

12% of population of England: 6.36 million

Population of Scotland: 5.4 million

In other words, if 12% of England did choose to up sticks and head north to their new EU neighbour, it would more than double the population of Scotland overnight. Native-born Scots would become a minority in their own land. And if the other 11% who haven’t ruled the idea out joined the 12%, Scotland would rocket from a nation of 5m people to one of nearly 18 million.

(The infrastructural pressure of such an influx, of course, might be partially eased by some of Scotland’s stauncher No/Leave/UKIP/Tory/BNP/Loyalist citizens deciding to head in the other direction, much to everyone’s profound sadness.)

Now, of course, it’s highly unlikely that even the whole of the 12% group would actually emigrate. But if even as few as a quarter of them did, that would be about 1.6 million new citizens. For perspective, the Scottish population has only grown by 1 million in the last 118 years.

And when you start thinking about the colossal scale of that change, it makes treating Scotland’s current economy as any reliable indicator of an independent Scotland’s look even more ridiculous than it already is.