What does it mean to belong to a nation that doesn’t recognise you? If you’ve spent any time on British political X in the last few days, you’ve likely seen a video of GB News US Correspondent Steve Edginton interviewing people in a pocket of South London about their relationship to British identity. The segment is part of a wider documentary titled Yookay vs Britain: How immigration transformed a nation.
But one moment in particular has captured public attention: a young black man passionately articulating his experience and sense of belonging. He is asked by Edgington about Britain and Britishness, and talks about south London, about Stockwell and Clapham, and how he was born in Britain and it is his “home”. When asked about Alfred the Great, the Duke of Wellington and Churchill, he is a bit unsure of himself but basically chirpy.
This is someone speaking with genuine cheer about where he is from. And the video should have been seen as a powerful example of authentic human expression. Instead, it has become a Rorschach test for the anxieties of the political right about culture, identity and race. As Harrison Pitt put it “he is anything but assimilated” and “associates ‘Britain’ with its most conquered, colonised, YooKay areas” as opposed to its “host people”. One young man in south London has obliviously become the personification of a perceived immigration emergency – and crisis of British nationhood.
For some time now, multiculturalism has been drifting to the centre of right-wing political discourse. Mass migration, cultural fragmentation, and identity politics have made conversations around integration deeply contested. These disputes have spawned the “Yookay” meme Pitt referred to, an ironic shorthand for the nation some believe Britain has become: deracinated, multicultural, its ancestral roots torn up or decayed. And this is why, in some quarters of the political right, we’re seeing the rise of what could be called “aesthetic citizenship” – the idea that one’s claim to national belonging isn’t measured by shared values, civic participation, or contribution, but by how well you conform to a dominant aesthetic defined by speech, dress, tone, posture, even emotional register.
The young man in the video didn’t “fit the part”. He was confident. He wore streetwear. He spoke in Multicultural London English. He was expressive, unapologetically himself. For some viewers, that alone disqualified him from true British citizenship – not on moral or civic grounds, but on aesthetic ones. This doesn’t align with the “model minority” trope – someone like Rishi Sunak, for instance, who embodies a version of Britishness that’s polished, palatable, and deferential to traditional norms. No one would brand Sunak as “Yookay” or question whether he belongs.
The backlash reveals something deeper: some people don’t actually want the integration of minorities; they want assimilation. To participate in British life isn’t enough. To be proud of Britain and call this place your home isn’t enough. You must perform a specific version of Britishness – soft-spoken, composed, restrained and possibly middle-class – to be considered truly one of us. And there is a growing danger that we are drifting into a form of racial – or more precisely, aesthetic – essentialism. This is a worldview that judges belonging not by shared commitment or civic identity, but by whether someone acts, speaks, or dresses like the children of the English shires.
This ignores a crucial historical fact: many non-white Britons are second- or third-generation citizens, raised in homes shaped not by afternoon tea and Enid Blyton, but by diasporic memory, migration trauma, religious conviction, and postcolonial resilience. These are not moral deficiencies. They are the consequence of distinct class trajectories and intergenerational cultural hybridity. But more importantly, none of this precludes love of country. None of it disqualifies someone from national loyalty, public service, or a desire to belong. You can wear a puffer jacket and love Britain. You can speak Multicultural London English and still believe in the Crown. You can be a Pentecostal and sing the national anthem with sincerity.
And this is precisely why aesthetic essentialism is so dangerous. It refuses to acknowledge the complexity of modern Britain. It tells a young man from Brixton, who may deeply love this country but doesn’t speak in clipped RP, that he is not one of us. This is not to say that one cannot raise legitimate concerns about aspects of urban youth culture. Critique has its place. But increasingly, these critiques are being used to mask a deeper racial hostility. Yes, the interviewee in the viral clip displayed a shaky grasp of British history. But let’s be honest: how many white Brits in Brixton – or anywhere else in the country – have opinions about King Alfred or the Duke of Wellington? Would their ignorance be used to question their Britishness?
The real issue isn’t knowledge. It’s framing. The clip is being used to pathologise a young black man’s entire presence, while ignoring broader systemic failures – such as the shortcomings of the British education system in teaching a cohesive and inclusive national history in the first place. But perhaps that’s unsurprising. The segment forms part of a larger documentary titled Yookay vs Britain – a framing that is inherently antagonistic. From the outset, it positions multiethnicity as a threat to “real” Britain rather than a constituent part of it.
The version of Britishness valorised by parts of the right isn’t even reflected in most white British citizens. Most people don’t speak Received Pronunciation, attend evensong, or read Kipling. So what is the standard – and who gets to set it? One wonders, too, how these same critics view white radical progressives: people born and raised in Britain who are hostile to the monarchy, embarrassed by empire, and deeply critical of British values. Their dissent is tolerated, even celebrated, because their aesthetic still “fits”.
This exposes the core issue. We don’t have a shared definition of Britishness. What we have instead is a fragmented Britain, where each subculture – liberal, conservative, urban, rural – has its own imagined standard of who qualifies as authentically British. And that, I would argue, is the greater threat to national cohesion than anything captured by the word “Yookay” – or than any young black man in south London.
[Further reading: Anarchy in the “yookay”]
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