WHO am I? Who are you? What do we want from life? What do we expect from government, the media and those who claim to represent our views? In the old days it was only marketing people who sought to categorise and brand us, using neat little compartments like “ABC1”or “GenX”.

We are bombarded with demands to declare ourselves and what we stand for, what we think. This is the era of populist politics, persistent in its demands, often channelled through its willing partner, social media. Instant judgment seems compulsory.

Where do you stand on the Milo Yiannopoulos question (and don’t dare deny that you have even heard of Breitbart’s enfant terrible)? What about Islamic State? Donald Trump? What about Brexiters, remoaners, cybernats and yoons? The demand to take sides is loud, insistent. We must choose, and promptly. I have Theresa May to thank for my recent pondering. Her appalling party conference speech last autumn, where she sought to set out her “vision for Britain”, managed to articulate divisiveness perfectly, even though it was intended apparently to achieve the opposite.

Mrs May might well have thought she was taking the electorate’s pulse, post Brexit; perhaps even presenting a case for a united front as she, our modern-day Boudicca, invokes the fabled Article 50, negotiating with faceless, authoritarian Brussels fictionalised almost entirely by her Foreign Secretary during his previous career as a scribbler.

Her touchstone comment was: “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”

In two sentences, her speechwriter encapsulated the little Englander mentality her party has come to represent. Those words, dripping in isolationism and meanness of spirit, will not be forgotten on either side of the Brexit debate, although for very different reasons. They imply a monoculture and deny the modern realities of multi-ethnicity, international contact and the way we live. Concepts of citizenship have been multilayered for a very long time.

Most of us are “citizens of the world”. We have access to information beyond our wildest imagination, mainly due to the internet. Our awareness of far-off events is instantaneous. Twenty years ago it was through the curated viewfinder of 24-hour TV news. Many of us saw quite dramatic scenes of last July’s coup attempt in Turkey via Periscope, a mobile application that pushes phone video live to the Web. Contrast that with 36 years ago, when those of us in Glasgow city centre only found out that John Lennon had died after a shooting by queuing for the latest edition of the Evening Times.

Perhaps populism is a retort to all of this. We do not like the implications of globalisation, so we try vainly to reverse it, using the crude responses of Brexit and Mr Trump. The neo-liberal economics that brought us the banking crisis are espoused by the same people who hail Brexit as the “cure”. They cannot wait for the UK’s supposed transformation into some kind of offshore tax haven. We think we can secure preferential trading terms from a man elected on an “America First” platform which wants to do deals, but only on American terms.

As Mrs May appeals for a coming together to “make Brexit work for everyone”, many check the emergency exit. It was a standing joke in football that the (English) manager of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Charlton, recruited players who could not get a game for their own country but managed to pull on the green shirts of Eire thanks to having an Irish granny. Plastic Paddies, people called them.

The Irish government is inundated with applications from Britons with Irish grannies. This could involve several million on the UK mainland and thousands are digging out old birth certificates and filling in forms.

Protestants in Northern Ireland, many of whom qualify as they were born while Ireland maintained its constitutional claim on the North, are applying. Ian Paisley Jnr, son of the late you-know-who, supported them: “My advice is if you are entitled to a second passport then take one ... take as many as you can, especially if you travel to different world trouble zones.”

Several hundred British Jews have applied to Germany for passports since last June, 20 times the normal rate. In many cases these are second or third generation Jews whose parents or grandparents were cast from Germany by the Nazis. Many have antecedents who perished in the death camps. They include Baroness Julia Neuberger, a high-profile rabbi and member of the House of Lords, born in England.

What drives a Jewish person, aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, to consider taking German citizenship? All sorts of things: revulsion at the isolationism of Brexit, admiration for the new Germany, or simply concern that a non-EU passport may be a handicap in future. Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Portugal have also reported big increases in passport inquiries from UK nationals.

Baroness Neuberger wrote: “I’m British, a passionate monarchist, a Londoner, European, female, Jewish, with strong Irish connections ... the list goes on ... I think it perfectly possible to be a proud Briton – and a grateful one – and to hold a German passport too.” All of this will be met with a shrug by Mrs May and her acolytes.

Why should they care whether people want dual citizenship as an insurance policy against a Brexit that might fail? These are people, quite intelligent most of them, who allow the language of political debate to be distorted for their ends; who deliberately allow the muddling of descriptions of illegals, refugees and EU migrants as if they all mean the same thing; who will leave hundreds of thousands of EU citizens anxiously wondering whether they have a future in the UK, because they might be a useful negotiating tool. Brexit has hardened attitudes and opinions, and not in a good way.

Many of us welcome people from elsewhere and don’t feel threatened by a woman wearing a headscarf or people speaking Polish on a bus. Forced to choose sides, I will come out as a citizen of the world (and therefore of “nowhere”). If I follow that path to its inevitable conclusion, why should we care about Mrs May’s Britain (or Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland)? Citizenship is all about the communities we feel part of, and it is not mutually exclusive.