So far, we have outlined a distinction between elite and mass interpretations of national identity, which produce different visions of the same Scotland. On the basis of the mass opinion data there is evidence to suggest a typology of national belonging which places defined non-civic criteria on national membership, including ethnicity, accent, birth and ancestry. The survey data, therefore, agreed with the observations of our manifesto analysis whereby examples of open and pluralistic conceptions of Scottishness coexist with more closed and bounded conceptions. These survey results are, of course, an aggregate of public opinion and tell us little about how an individual's nationalism may manifest itself in daily life. Therefore, to examine how members of the nation enact their individual nationalism we now focus on discourses of, to use Anderson's phrase, ‘the daily plebiscite’. Enabled by electronic media and the internet, we examine the language of an online public discussion of a newspaper article. In so doing, we begin to understand some of the ways in which nationalism operates as an everyday discursive phenomenon, as well as the variety of idiosyncratic imaginings that individuals enact.

Billig's banal nationalism analytic, exploring how the homeland is ‘flagged’ daily in the popular print press, is developed upon. The use of narrative in the ‘flagging’ of national identity is illustrated. Taking narrative out of ‘the novel’, we draw a more nuanced picture of how national identity can be discursively ‘flagged’, going beyond simple grammatical deixis, and again demonstrating an absence of civic and pluralistic instantiations of Scottish national identity in the public's discourse.