23 April 2025

Anarchy in the “yookay”

How the new right came to loathe Britain even more than the radical left.

Illustration by Matt Kenyon / Ikon Images

Rucksacked Deliveroo cyclists in convoy, swarming along road and pavement. Tattered, pockmarked high streets, enlivened only by phone shops, chicken shops and random outbursts of violence. And, most prominently, black and South Asian men, the former threateningly ski-masked and communicating exclusively through drill rap, the latter combining an aggressively masculine form of Islam with inner-city gang culture. Welcome to “the yookay”, the verbal and social corruption of “the UK” that so much of the political right believes it sees in modern Britain.

These garish images have become the main stock-in-trade for the cackling satirists of the right who now dominate X. Viewed en masse, they form a sort of dystopic comic strip, a racialised and frequently racist scrapbook of 21st-century British life. But the “yookay” also denotes something more specific: the grubby successor state to the country once known as Britain, now possessed by third-world immigrants, alien cultures and mounting anarchy.

Much like “Boriswave”, the neologism is becoming mainstream political terminology. “Yookay” also describes the political settlement established by Blair’s government in 1997 (a year increasingly seen on the right as an axis equivalent to Thatcher’s victory in 1979), year zero for our immigrant-hungry gig economy, an emasculated Westminster state servile to lawyer and quango, and a public realm that treats multiculturalism as an objective.

In friendly complicity, nicknames are endearing. Anywhere else, they are bullying, belittling. And at one time, nicknames for national failure were a speciality of the intellectual left. In fact, though the modern sense of “yookay” emerged in the linguistically fertile swamps of 4chan, the term was first used by the Welsh nationalist and Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams. His “Yookay” referred derisively to the British state that smothered its Celtic regions beneath a homogenising and narrowly Anglicised national culture.

But the most influential stylisation of “UK” has been Tom Nairn’s “Ukania”, first used in his 1988 study of the British monarchy, The Enchanted Glass. Ukania is Nairn’s byword for a country he loathed with more sophistication than any other political writer. Explicitly intending Ukania to succeed Williams’s sense of the Yookay, Nairn was punning on “Kakania”, the alternative name for the Austro-Hungarian empire from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and on the imaginary central European kingdom of “Ruritania”.

The central European comparison was not incidental. Like the faded conceit of Austria-Hungary, Nairn considered the British archipelago an irreconcilable ethnic patchwork. As early as the 1970s he championed the rise of the Scottish nationalism that came within 200,000 votes of independence in 2014. But beyond the historical comparison, Nairn hoped his term captured the “spiritual territory” of the UK. He believed the British monarchy was its most punishing feudal hangover, binding together a constitution that is otherwise an imperial husk, built to rule over landmasses that long escaped it.

This was of a piece with Nairn’s more general view of a British culture dazzled by “the glamour of backwardness”. Delusions of past grandeur are a very British opiate (he singles out Roger Scruton’s love letter to our crown-embossed red telephone boxes for particular mockery). In After Britain, published in 2000, Nairn wrote of “Ukania’s fin de siècle”, arguing that the Blairite modernisation, including Scottish and Welsh devolution, was comparable to the late-19th-century constitutional reforms it was hoped would rescue Austria-Hungary.

“Ukania” carries an erudition that the right’s “yookay” – more a playground jeer – never will. But they share an unfeigned contempt for Britain in its existing form. Hatred of Britain was arguably Nairn’s most consistent intellectual inspiration. Now, the right has reached such a stage of reaction that the present is a nightmare. The features of British conservatism have irrevocably changed, Scruton’s gentle aestheticism twisted into a rictus sneer.

Nairn regarded Britain as conditionally stunted, unable to achieve political or economic maturity because of its innate conservatism. Today, abandoning the myth of the dynamic Thatcherite legacy, it is instead the right that sees Britain as hopelessly lethargic, and in need of rapid technological modernisation.

I recently attended an event discussing “Anglofuturism” – another meme of the right that now has pretensions towards political programming. One of the panellists referred to the “yookay” meme as a shorthand for Britain today, sickly and static. Anglofuturism is imagined as a sort of shock therapy involving state-led economic development of industries such as nuclear power, and reasserting a sense of cultural nationalism, clothing new infrastructure in the folk mythos of England’s past.

Tom Nairn believed that Ukania was in a process of irrevocable fragmentation. His 1977 book was titled The Break-Up of Britain (without a question mark), and in December 2020, shortly before his death, he predicted this would happen “in the next five years”. The young right-wingers who came of age after a decade and a half of national humiliation are not quite as relaxed about the settled motions of history. Their patriotism has calcified into political despair – and its companion, a mobilising and nationalistic fury. Their “yookay” isn’t a glib, fatalistic diagnosis. It is a reality they intend to sweep away.

[See also: Conservatism is dead]