The Sunday Times has a new Panelbase poll out today, and it borrows a question that was first asked by this website (via the same pollster) 14 months ago. These were the results this month:

They broadly show little change from when we asked last year (for the five options the changes are +1, 0, -3, +8 and -5), suggesting that the main practical upshot of the EU referendum campaign was to halve the number of Don’t Knows, which was achieved by shifting almost all of them straight onto the Leave side with the Remain camp’s abysmal recreation of Better Together’s “Project Fear”.

Nevertheless, the chart is a fascinating and pertinent one. Because while there’s only one of the four non-DK groups in the list who definitely can’t get what they want, there’s another one whose decision will be a lot harder than Yes supporters would like.

The single favourite option of Scots – now by a clear 5% margin compared to the 1% of the last poll – is independence within the EU. That in itself is a pretty interesting fact. But the second most-popular option, and the most popular on the Unionist side, was blown out of the water by the Brexit vote.

The 28% of people – representing over a million Scottish voters – who want to stay in both the UK and the EU are in the very near future going to be faced with a choice of one or the other. It would need only a quarter of them to choose the EU for independence to be the majority option overall.

That sounds like great news. But the equation, of course, is much less simple than that. Because the chart also suggests that fully a quarter of independence supporters want out of Europe, and it’s those people – not traditional Unionists – who are the biggest fly in the Yes movement’s ointment.

It’s not hard to pick up flickerings of very considerable anger and resentment among Yes activists towards the Brexiters within their camp. Events have conspired to put independence eminently within reach far sooner than almost anyone expected, only for people who voted Yes in 2014 to tear it away again for reasons that most of those inclinded towards Remain consider stupid at best, and racist at worst.

Yet while understandable on an emotional level, such an attitude risks repeating the exact same mistakes made by the Remain campaign. Voters don’t take kindly to being treated as xenophobes and idiots and bombarded with self-righteous lectures. In the days leading up to the EU vote this site watched in horror as social media was swamped with pompous diatribes from Remainers proclaiming themselves owners of the moral high ground, an approach all but guaranteed to be counter-productive.

Contrary to what the nation’s reliably-clueless political pundits assert in almost daily opinion columns, the big decision that faces Nicola Sturgeon isn’t the timing of the next indyref. Current polls show that voters oppose having one, but that won’t stop them voting in it whenever it happens, so it’s a fact of little to no importance.

What matters is the attitude that the future Yes movement takes to the very large part – almost 40% – of the Scottish electorate who at that referendum will face a choice between two options they don’t like.

The offer to the 28% of double-unionists pretty much takes care of itself. Capturing at least a quarter of them ought to be an eminently manageable task. But if the 11% of neither-unionists are alienated in the process it’ll all be for nothing.

This site’s view is that an independent Scotland would be better off in the EU, chiefly because it’s not like the UK’s unequal union where one partner steamrollers the other with weight of numbers. But dismissing Leavers as a bunch of backwards racist is no different to asserting that all Yes voters are motivated by hatred of the English.

The argument over the EU can be settled in an independent Scotland, with the added benefit (in the light of the UK’s exit) of a much clearer picture of what leaving the EU would really look like. It’s vital that pro-Remain independence campaigners have faith in the power of their arguments and don’t try to shut off that debate.

Two years from the heartbreaking defeat of 2014, and despite the collapse in oil revenue and the grudgingly-delivered tiny crumbs of extra devolution, independence is closer now than it has ever been. And as this site has consistently maintained since its first month of existence, it must be primarily championed on its own merits and not tied into specific policies, whether they be higher taxes, lower taxes, nuclear weapons, membership of the EU or anything else.

(A view echoed by Nicola Sturgeon in today’s Sunday Herald.)

If you believe in independence, then you believe in the ability and right of Scotland’s people to decide those matters for themselves. But first we must win that ability and that right. In the tumultuous years to come, we hope everyone can remember that.