Can the Great British public be made to care passionately about the EU referendum?

It’s early days, I know, but the Outers have convinced me. Britain will not collapse into chaos and penury if we leave the European Union. The Inners, meanwhile, have convinced me, too: there is no great, looming danger if we stay. Thus I have a question. What are we going to spend the next 18 months talking about? I don’t see it. I may be wrong, and often am. Here and now, though, I do not see the looming spark which will ignite the dry tinder of the Great British public into giving a toss. Which I think is something that people who are passionate about this argument, on either side, do not quite see. They think it will be fiery. Apocalyptic. Four Horsemen, Eurogog and Euromagog, and a beast crawling out of the sea with a € or a £ on its forehead, depending. They see the fight coming for which they have been preparing almost for ever, and they think everybody else will care. To be more terrestrial, they think it will be like it was with Scotland. Remember that? Those few curious weeks last year when even some perfectly sane people were waking up at 4 a.m., checking opinion polls and lying awake? The turnout was 85 per cent, and no wonder. This was existential. In Scotland and the rest of the UK alike, it was about who we were to be. And what they think, the two sides (or perhaps more — it is hard to keep track) of the pending EU referendum, is that what looms will be similar. It won’t be. We are not that sort of European. Some of us are, obviously, and you’ll perhaps find a handful of Europhile jet-setting city types whose pockets jingle with euros and Swiss francs, and who cannot quite get their heads around the fact that most people’s pockets don’t.