Attitudes to national history and diversity in Great Britain

The British sample’s responses to the closed-ended questions in the ACS poll demonstrated widespread pride in national history, but more ambivalent attitudes towards cultural diversity. Responses to the open-ended question revealed differences between the national historical narratives used by people living in Scotland and England. People in England could invoke images of their national past in flexible ways, to support ethnic nationalist lines of argument, or else to construct critical, liberal images of the national present.