SCOTTISH voters are overwhelmed, tired and confused and have no stomach for another referendum campaign. They expect Brexit to be a shambles, but that isn’t yet enlisting them to the cause of independence. That may seem like a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but sometimes you need scientific research to show that appearances do not deceive. And this research comes from an unexpected source: the Scottish Independence Convention. It bravely commissioned Heriot Watt University to convene a range of focus groups to explore what Scottish voters actually think, rather than just conduct opinion polls. All credit to them because no one else is doing this.

On the face of it, the research conducted by Dr Iain Black, an associate professor of marketing, makes sobering reading for supporters of independence. His qualitative study gives few grounds for hoping that No and undecided voters will shortly be flocking to Yes. Most don’t rate Brexit, but they don’t appear to have great confidence that an independent Scotland would be any better. They are even, it seems, averse to the very thought of independence campaigns right now.

The logic of events may play into the hands of the independence movement, but that makes it extraordinarily difficult for campaigning organisations like the Scottish Independence Convention (SIC) to know what to do in the meantime. One is tempted to say they should go and join a book club until the Brexit game of Deal Or No Deal is finally resolved sometime in 2021. Actually, that isn’t a bad idea: another Heriot Watt finding is that most voters feel that they didn’t get the facts they needed to make sense of the indyref campaign in 2014.

Dr Black says it is important to understand what his focus groupies meant here by “facts”: they did not mean statistics. Voters are up to here with statistics and no longer believe them. Whether its GERS, oil revenues, fiscal holes or national income after independence they just close their ears when they the numbers start flying. They are looking for something a great deal more sophisticated. How to provide this kind of intelligence – what you might call reliable propaganda – is another matter. It’s a problem that faces all politics in the social media age where emotion often overwhelms debate and experts are mistrusted. Too many of Scotland’s political classes spend time swapping memes on Twitter instead of persuading undecided voters.

Politics is about changing attitudes, not merely confirming them. But the Independence Convention’s conference next week in Edinburgh will have to start from the reality that the voters are elsewhere right now. However, it can use the event to recreate that sense of solidarity among the disparate groups who came together so energetically during 2014. The Greens, Scottish Socialists, Women for Independence, Radical Independence Campaign and others ignited a remarkable ferment of debate in Scotland under the Yes Scotland banner. That hasn’t gone away; even if the independence debate has gone underground. SIC is an embodiment of the organisational and ideological distance of those Yessers from the Scottish Government. The Yes campaign’s strength was its diversity.

Voters may be scunnered right now, but in the medium term, Brexit is more likely to strengthen the case for independence than weaken it – and not just because most Scots voted Remain. Yesterday’s Herald report on the London School of Economics confirming that Scotland stands to take a £30 billion hit from leaving the EU will surely not be the last of its kind. Groups like the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (who hated the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy) are now warning of a “power grab” by Westminster as they realise control of Scottish fishing grounds is going south. Supporters of devolution are rightly concerned that the EU Withdrawal Bill redraws the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster by specifying the powers devolved rather than the powers reserved. The refusal to listen, or engage with, the Scottish Government’s call for immigration to be devolved betokens a much tougher approach to Scotland post-Brexit.

It seems inevitable that Brexit will lead to the creation of a new and tighter version of the incorporating Union. Westminster is taking power back from the EU and is not going to give it away again, willy nilly, to a rival parliament in Scotland. The consolidation of the UK single market to replace the existing European one, will anyway require regulatory uniformity across the entire UK, under the authority of Westminster. The days when Holyrood had relative autonomy, by virtue of the EU connection, are past. Its authority will wane in inverse proportion to Westminster’s rise.

Brexit is not just about trade: it is a project for national renewal, about making Britain great again through a vigorous reassertion of national identity. The No-Deal Brexiteers, with their dream of creating a zero-tariff, small-state Britain – “letting the British Lion roar again” – have little support in Scotland, where nostalgia for the golden years of the British Empire is in short supply. For many Scots, the Brexit process has become a Whitehall Farce in which preposterous elitists, like the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, parade their little England prejudices, while making a pig’s ear out of trade negotiations. It’s all the SNP’s Christmases come at once.

Even the latest incarnation of Better Together, called These Islands, inspired by the Unionist blogger, Kevin Hague, and the broadcaster Dan Snow, rather gives the game away. Its very name is a tacit admission that Brexit has made it all but impossible to talk positively about the Union right now. Instead, like a Unionist version of Prince, it can only refer to these islands-that-used-to-be-known-as-the-UK.

The Union has been scunnered by Brexit just as the Scottish voting public has. Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union has been the great disruption that has left nationalism and Unionism gasping for breath and unable to command events. But the Brexit fog will eventually clear, and whoever has the best arguments in the light of day will win the future. Independence may be off the agenda today, but history of these islands is yet to be written.