A Growing Liberalisation: How social attitudes have shifted in the UK and beyond

The UK now ranks among the most socially liberal countries internationally, following huge shifts in attitudes on issues such as homosexuality, casual sex, abortion, euthanasia and divorce, according to new data. Of around 20 countries included in a study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, the UK emerges as one of the most accepting nations, with attitudes also softening on prostitution and suicide, even if these are still seen as unjustifiable to the vast majority. However, UK attitudes are relatively less liberal on the death penalty, as the country has a more favourable view of capital punishment than various comparable nations, despite Britons’ support for it declining in recent years. The findings were produced for a major new research programme as part of the World Values Survey (WVS), one of the largest and most widely used academic social surveys in the world that has been in operation since 1981. The latest UK data, collected in 2022, builds on previous surveys that asked the public to rate the extent to which they found various actions “justifiable” or not, with data for other nations collected at various points throughout the latest wave of the WVS, which spanned 2017 to 2022.