Imagine yourself back 30 years ago. If somehow you had been given a glimpse into the country’s future, I am pretty confident certain things would have seemed quite incredible. To choose just a few not-quite-random recent examples:
That we would have ignored the well-known fact of the
mass gang rape of young girls across British cities for decades;
That the British state would be unable to build a railway line between London and Birmingham and would spend nearly £100 billion proving it;
That Parliament would
allow women to kill their unborn baby at any point without committing any crime.
You might have said in response that surely there must have been a massive change in the demographic, cultural, practical and indeed moral characteristics of Britain to make this possible. You might have said “That doesn’t sound like the same country I live in now”, the country which had dragged itself out of a huge economic and political hole, played a huge role in winning the Cold War, and just finished building a tunnel under the sea to France.
And I think you would be right. Of course there has been no sudden moment of change. As 1990s-you got older, you might have detected glimmers of what was to come in the saga of the Millennium Dome or the 2001 Bradford riots. But there would come a moment when you would look around and say “Now I see it. Things really are different now”.
What we are living through today, in a phrase, is an unprecedented break in national continuity. As a country we are disconnecting from the old Britain. The Britain of our national story is disappearing, the Britain of the Romans through the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, Nelson and Wellington, the two world wars and even the Attlee settlement.
Gone is the Britain of Christianity and the Church as a core component of British identity, and moral judgement has become utilitarian, about what is convenient, disconnected from any traditional, let alone transcendental, set of values.
Fast receding is the Britain of real state capacity and national ambition, as we move from Victorian St Pancras to the hole in the ground at Euston, from the first nuclear power station back to the windmill.
Our national character is changing. We are, at last, becoming the “young country”, the country without a past, that Tony Blair wanted.
Part of the reason is immigration, in particular the genuinely
mass migration of the last decade or two, making London close to a majority foreign-born city and giving us our first taste of ethnic and communal politics.
But equally, perhaps even more, responsible is the phenomenon of secular progressivism, turbo-charged into aggressive wokeism, with its belief that the historical past is irrelevant and probably actively immoral, and its determination to produce heaven on earth by releasing people from one inherited constraint after another, including finally those of biology itself.
We have become a very different society over the last 30 years. And I think one unusual indicator captures it: the name of the country. Over the 1990s you would have seen “Great Britain” slowly becoming “the UK”. Google NGram shows that before 1960 the term “UK” was barely used. Then, between 1980 and 2000, it suddenly leaps up to become much the most common term for the country, well above “Britain” or “Great Britain”. It still is.
I don’t think this is by chance. The only real parallel is the “USA”, a country which makes a virtue of its newness and of its origins in a political idea. I think the “UK” as a term spread for similar reasons. It felt inclusive and in line with the ideology of multiculturalism in a young country. People coming here could retain their ethnic and cultural markers, their connection with the old country, while being a “UK” citizen too.
You could choose a traditional British historical or cultural identity, like that of England or Scotland, but you didn’t have to. As a result, the word “British” gradually ceased to be an ethnic or cultural term and became simply the adjective relating to the noun “UK”. And we became known to the world not by a historical name but as a bureaucratic abbreviation.
Some commentators on social media now go one step further and now, humorously or derisively, call us not the UK but the “Yookay”. As you’ll find if you google them, the term was initially used to symbolise the particular aesthetic quality of much of the modern UK, that jarring mixture of cultures bolted onto the pre-existing British environment. The American candy store next to the kebab shop with its modern signage stuck onto a half-timbered building. The scattered Lime bikes and discarded Deliveroo bags slung wherever on the street. And the soundtrack of modern Britain, multicultural London English with its global slang, the drill music on the train without headphones. If you live in a city, you recognise it.
But the “Yookay” now has a wider implication too: to suggest with the new name that we are now a new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain, distinct from it as I have described. And indeed we are becoming it: the Wessex or Mercia to Roman Britain, the “
island of strangers” in Starmer’s genius phrase, grottier, “scuzzier” as
The Spectator put it the other day, with a different national character, and with lower national ambition.
Happily the transformation isn’t complete yet. We don’t have to become the Yookay. We don’t have to live out our days like Roman villa-owners farming our estates as things collapse around us.
Economic, social, and political reform – everything I have been setting out here over the years – can get us back on track. But for that we need politicians who can see what’s going on and who care enough to get the country moving again – and who can reach back to the past, back beyond that break in continuity, to get the national energy to make it happen.
For as George Orwell put it, in the final words of his great wartime essay
The Lion and the Unicorn, “we must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.”
Amen to that.
