‘I WISH this campaign had more wish trees”. The commentator who tweeted this in the last days of the EU ref is, let us say, not an ardent friend of independence. But his reference was obvious, and quite moving, to those who picked it up.

The wish trees were the often-derided initiative of National Collective, the artists and creatives organisation active in the last independence referendum. Wherever they campaigned, NC asked people to tie their best wishes for Yes to the branch of a nearby tree. Both happy-clappy and hippy-trippy, snarled the commentariat.

But as the commentator said in another tweet, “I’m actually serious”. As spectres of migrant invasion mingled with the smoke from a gun fatally fired in a Northern English village, he was remembering how an “existential” campaign can be conducted with gentle creativity, as well as thundering terror. (As this paper reported, EU ref wish trees did eventually go up in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street).

So if another Yes campaign is possibly on the cards – or at least some test of Scots political will before the Brexit negotiations conclude – then what will, or what should, it be like? There are hundreds of thousands of words already produced on this, and there will be millions more to come. My pebble chucked on the beach is concerned with how we think about No voters now, and what the EU referendum and recent voting patterns can teach us about that.

I will admit it took me at least a year to even begin to understand some of the spectrum of reasons, and emotions, behind a No vote in the first indyref. This is partly about how long it takes to step down from the activist personality – the burning zeal that perfectly lines up who you are with what you do.

I would also maintain that the Yes campaign itself was unusually immersing and all-encompassing. We thought we were transforming a crude binary vote on constitutional independence into a much wider and more inspiring discussion. That is, how to build a good, diverse and equal society, for ourselves and as an exemplar to others.

But my growing realisation of how Yes appeared to those outwith our well-fired movement has become only clearer since the Brexit vote. It’s the reports of Remainers staying in bed for days, rushing to join the Labour Party, walking stunned down the street and wondering what lurks in the breasts of passers-by ... a familiar set of trauma reactions to Scots Yessers, I’m sure.

Now, is it so hard to imagine that this might also have been the reaction-set from No voters, if we’d sneaked the same small majority as Leave just did? Remain voters often talk of their horror of being ripped out of the larger whole of the European Union – the many ties that connect them to the continent, snapping and recoiling like so many dangerous, whip-lashing cables.

For some Britain-identifying Scots No voters – perhaps a third of their number – this is what independence would have (and might still) feel like: a vast wrench, in the wrong historical and cultural direction. I’ve been the first to point out how much the SNP’s White Paper bent over backwards to placate those fears – we’ll keep the Queen, the pound, the BBC, Nato; “British” will stay but it’ll be like “Scandinavian” or “Nordic”; don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry...

What has stung so badly in the last few days is that the Brexiteers gained their majority on a much cruder, less sensitively “interdependent” proposition than the SNP Government’s White Paper. Indeed, in terms of their messaging on immigration controls, I’m being polite about the Leave campaign.

To me, it is unimaginable that any Scottish independence campaign would ever connect national self-determination to economic and cultural fears about immigrants and migrants this way. If that was what made the difference between the two referenda, and a future Yes campaign adjusted itself accordingly, Scotland wouldn’t deserve to be a new nation-state. I wouldn’t support that.

Be the Scotland you wish to see. We win indy by the high road, or not at all. And by voting so solidly to remain in the EU – while being subjected to all the same roaring propaganda engines as anyone else on these islands – we are continuing on the high road set by the Yes movement, and our SNP and now indy-majority governments.

Yet we should try to be honest, and clear, about what recent Scottish voting patterns really mean. For us, last week was (strictly speaking) a European-Unionist vote. Even when led by a nationalist government, Scots are as much “connectionists” as they are “sovereigntists”. SNP MPs are sent down to Westminster in such huge numbers not to perform the political version of Wembley pitch invasions, but to engage with the machinery of UK governance – for Scottish, but also the general progressive, interest.

Our Remain vote, and England and Wales’s Leave vote, does something quite extraordinary for this Scottish connectionism – which, otherwise, indy activists might have had to start accepting as an ultimate ceiling on their appetite for a separate nation-state. Wasn’t that possibly indicated by the rise in a Scottish Tory vote at the last Holyrood elections, responding to Ruth Davidson’s “no second indyref” mantra?

The so-called Di Lampudesa strategy of IndyLite – change everything, so nothing really changes – finds its ultimate proof in Sturgeon’s current EU manoeuvres. Help us to stay as we are; stop us from being ripped away from you, “chers collègues” (as Alyn Smith put it in his Euro Parliament mini-speech, in the original language of European diplomacy).

The strategy isn’t home and dry yet, but we could be looking at a Yes vote in indyref2 as a resonant act of small-c Scottish conservatism. Particularly as the Leave techno-libertarians – warned about in this column before the EU ref – start to gleefully hack away at the public bodies and services of the UK state.

How do I feel about that line? Not entirely happy. For example, we can’t just substitute “another Europe is possible for all” with “the current Europe is now accessible for us”. The French veto of TTIP – the trade treaty which threatened to open our EU member states to legally-enforced privatisation of public services – is a desperately welcome sign that the European market model isn’t just arrogant bankers screwing it to Greece.

But we must retain enough sovereign self-confidence to be able to critique the Europe we want to join. Indeed, we must ally ourselves with reform movements across the continent (Yanis Varoufakis’ DIEM has the most momentum) who argue for much more transparent operations in the EU. After that, a whole range of experiments in democracy that can start to de-corporatise and de-bureaucratise the continent.

Is there a possibility that the 90s vision of a “social Europe” might slowly regain hold, once the historic finance-capital obsessions of the UK are unplugged from the European mainstream? That might be idealistic. But in any case, that’s the kind of argument I’d want an independent Scotland to be making. Alyn Smith’s list of desires for his country – to be “internationalist, cooperative, ecological, fair, European” – is not a bad start.

And how do we support, on the same landmass, that 48 per cent of Euro-minded connectionists who feel as traumatised as Yessers felt on the morning of September 19? And how do we converse with a Leave vote which had, as part of its discourse, a very familiar cry for self-government? A wish-tree for those thorny questions, to be festooned in the coming months.