In the NWAC's patriotic narrative, the values celebrated by proprietorial patriotism supplied the foundations of British national identity. Supranational patriotism provided a validation of this value-based identity and a means of demonstrating that more could be done. Adversarial patriotism reminded Britons of threats to their identity to revitalise their commitment to the war effort. Quantitatively, these sub-patriotisms represented a substantial proportion of NWAC propaganda, often the majority of a speech or article. However, purposively they merely contextualised the NWAC's core message, that the British people not only had a particular national identity, but were duty-bound to maintain it. Sometimes this message amounted to a minuscule proportion of the overall piece – the ‘moral of the story’. Over-explication of Britons' duties without such contextualisation might be counter-productive, potentially discouraging citizens by making stark demands for public exertion without a reasonable purpose.

Propagandists' recognition of the danger of antagonising war-weary civilians with unreasonable demands was manifested in their discussions of duty. Together with a rhetoric of sacrifice, NWAC propaganda espoused a complementary view of duty stressing obligations but emphasising the praiseworthy meeting of these by most individuals and communities, with ‘consent and coercion [becoming] reciprocal functions of each other’. In this dual approach, civic patriotism extended the contextual subpatriotisms, especially proprietorial patriotism. Since, so NWAC rhetoric assumed, Britons lived in a privileged nation with institutions and laws to protect key civilisational values, citizens should work unstintingly to maintain the British way of life.