Way back in a happier, simpler age — 2012 to be precise — the polling company Populus conducted focus groups in Scotland to identify the best approach that should be taken by the nascent Better Together campaign during the referendum on Scottish independence.

It was not an especially happy experience. The team discovered that the voters who would decide the outcome had vanishingly little connection to, or empathy with, the idea of Britain or Britishness. In the fashion beloved by polling companies, these were dubbed “comfortable pragmatists” and “uncommitted security seekers”. The million voters living in “middle Scotland” were neither sold on the dream of independence nor swayed by unionist appeals to their heart. They wanted to know what was in it for them, and