“……The adoption of the name ‘the Yookay’ is therefore to be understood as an entirely natural counterpart to the country’s re-appropriation, by a new governing regime, and thus a new set of distributions and divisions and a newly productive economy….”
To give substance to your claim, this new “governing regime” has taken upon itself to rename ‘His Majesty’s Government’ - where the Monarch is the ultimate representative of the People even where Parliament and the Executive fails them - to now be officially referred to as ‘The UK Government’. I kid you not!
Sadly we have an impotent Monarch who has embraced a broader definition of ‘the People’ which includes anybody with their feet on this land, no matter how they got here or where they came from.
Similarly, Starmer, the fuckwit kludge, calls the government "My Government". No it is not. It is the current Monarch's privilege to say that. I am sure is is deliberate. If Charles had any balls he would publicly chastise him. Mum would have.
As you will know, our credentialled classes have also been busy renaming Eskimos, Calcutta, Peking and so on, but not Rome, Brussels or Munich. I do hope our friends in the EU aren't offended.
The currently popular character Amelia pointedly refers to us as Britain, British and Brits and perhaps it's a sign that the tide is turning. I'm hoping we've passed peak Yookay - that's sooo Tony Blair now, y'know.
And yet T Blair, immersed as he was in the new regime, himself used the slogan, "New Labour, New Britain". So perhaps he was riding a wave of change rather than driving it.
"...late-19th century peasants suddenly having to think up surnames for themselves and their families on the spot".
Very interesting! I remember, long ago, reading somewhere that when the English compelled the Welsh to take English surnames, they struck back satirically by agreeing that as many of them as possible would become Jones, Williams, or some other stereotyped name. This had the effect of somewhat countering the English desire to make them uniquely identifiable. Hence the prevalence of "Oh no, he is Jones the post, you want Jones the fish".
This brings something new to my thinking that I had not previously thought about or considered.
Perhaps my metaphor (and I do like a good metaphor) is renaming or naming is a bit like a new lock on something, and the 'key' word shows you accept your vassal position. Enthusiastic usage is swearing the new oath of allegiance.
Very interesting essay. This is of course a key tool of the coloniser. Brian Friels play Translations deals with this in the Irish context and the first OS in 1833.
So the Yookay is another way of disconnecting the physical reality of soil and people into a rootless legal abstraction and thus handing more control to the technocratic/managerial elite. But they are just doing here what they did elsewhere first.
This isn’t a process based on a ratchet mechanism. There’s nothing to stop anyone reverting to the use of Britain as the name of our country. And if that usage is associated with values of pride in place and nationhood, the somewheres not the anywheres, it will find purchase in the same way UK did, and for similar reasons: fashion plus preference.
I agree, and disagree. I do my best to use Britain, British, etc. But the change has been rapid and pronounced. I am not sure if there is something Canute-like about pretending otherwise.
I think the terms were interchangeable until the EU changed our national vehicle designation to UK and our craven, useless government accepted it to grease the wheels for another “reset” that probably left us in a worse position than before.
The logo on certain T-shirts - FCUK - certainly has a deeper allusion after reading Dr McGrogan's article. A country that's now fcuked. Pronounced 'fooked'.
Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons could have produced a tunic emblazoned with the logo CNUT to indicate what sort of man this Danish overlord really was. And to indicate the sort of change in the territory that this dynasty signified.
During the several centuries of the Norman kings, the Anglo-Saxon Christian names were largely replaced by those of different origins.
Over the same period, there are a couple of other nomenclature shifts that I found jarring in the speed and apparent disingenuousness with which they were taken up: subject to citizen, and politicians to political class. Some might say the shift to “political class” was initially supposed to be derogatory and referred to Peter oborne’s book “the triumph of the political class” but it swiftly seemed to become the accepted collective noun.
I know that the legal move away from “British subject” began in the post war period and cemented legally in the 1980s, but it didn’t really break through until Brown in the late New Labour years.
Both of these name changes had the effect of shifting the sense of relationship between the people and the state.
This coincided with the near collapse of the global financial markets and the declaration in various speeches by almost all major world governments/leaders that they were ready for a new world order. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but just saying….
I think Nigel Farage can be credited with popularisation of the term "political class". But I think it refers to something different from "politicians". It includes journalists, opinion formers, civil servants,those with power, a ruling elite.
I suppose Mr Farage didn't want to use the term "ruling class" as it would make him sound like an old fashioned communist!
you're absolutely right about the importance of naming. I live on the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic Archipelago, in the territory of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and I never refer to it any other way. Works for me.
Added to which, we all used to be proud Britons. Now we're just "Brits".
Also, the Queen was known universally as the Queen of England, not the Queen of Britain. We hadn't had a British Queen since Boudicea. So arguably the country that was replaced, for the great majority of people, was England, not Britain.
There was a push in the EU for the following shorthand to be used: UKe for England, UKw for Wales etc. Note the use of lower-case for the name of the nation, degrading it yet further. Perhaps they're still using that shorthand, I don't know.
"...the Britain that some of us remember is gone and that the Yookay has killed it".
Thanks! That corresponds exactly to my feelings, which I previously was unable to understand clearly.
By the way, it also helps to explain the peculiar usage of the name "Europe", which is universally deemed a continent along with Asia, Africa, North and South America, Antarctica, and perhaps Australia.
Of course Europe is unique among "continents" in being a rather insignificant part of another continent - Asia. If Europe deserves the title of "continent", so do - for instance - India and Arabia. Alaska, anyone? Patagonia?
I have the same visceral objection to "Yookay National" as the Scots have to being referred to as British. Britain ...ok, the island has a name. The British....or Britisher, more nuanced. The English, being a conglomeration of the descendents of numerous races, including some from continental Europe and Scandinavia, chose the less racist 'Britsh' denomination. The Welsh could be Welsh and still be British without loss of identity. The Scots were ever Scots and frankly object to being categorised equivalent to the mongrels and miscegenated people to the south. Yet, yet, a proportion of the Scots want a return to the EU? Not proper, old school Scots surely? No unification with the Briton+European/Scandi England/Wales but unification with the vast melting pot of Europe (East & West). Strikes me there is deliberate mischief being done to us all. YooKay is just the superficial sign.
Curtis Yarvin on the mechanical aspects of change:
“Power is habitual obedience; Regime change is a structured discontinuity in the habits of obedience. It must never be forgotten that regime change is a change to obeying something else.”
Now his judgement on just what this new Nomos pertains. Nomos meaning laws or standards or as per this author “spacial order” :
“So you ask your Priest: if not God King and Church what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so thinking logically you became a Satanist. This probably happened to you except it wasn’t a priest but a guidance counselor. The way the world works, never changes.”
Not optimistic but funny.
I say we have traded in our lovely old cultural ways that make life livable for ….a void.
Patrick Deneen:
“Christendom morphed into liberalism and the failure of liberalism is that a truly liberated people belongs nowhere And is attached to nothing.”
My fellow Canadian Marshal McLuhan opened his book Understanding Media with what must be the most enormous proclamation ever (the temerity!):
“ After 3000 years of explosion by means of mechanical and fragmentary technology, the Western world is imploding.”
Stick that yer pipe and smoke it:lol!
Our goodly author has done a service by explaining the “UK” parlance as a way of seeing this change to a new spacial order that washes over us. But it’s the same everywhere. Curious. Maybe the force acting on us is quite large:
“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns . We are suddenly eager to have things and people express their beings totally.” McLuhan on why all previous patterns must collapse, and his famous global village quip.
Why everywhere at once and can we stop this erosion?
Answer: no. Our author says as much, he comes at the same conclusion. We can’t stop it. This analysis is not the end point but just the beginning. A brand new beginning. I’m not sure where this will lead us, but I think it might be…..to hell on earth.
Interesting that we don’t yet have an adjective to go with the noun United Kingdom in the way we do with Britain and British.
If asked what your nationality is you can’t (yet) answer UKish; you would still, I think, say British, or English, Scottish or Welsh. The gradual evolution has a little way to go yet! Maybe the proud traditions of the non English nations are our last line of defence.
In the meantime I have made a note to self never to catch myself saying U.K. when Britain, or even Great Britain when I want to make a point, would be the mot juste.
Converting ‘Britain’ to the Yookay may not have been a defined policy but it has certainly been brought about by stealth and deliberate intent by the self appointed Elite, the “un-Brits” who have infiltrated every organ-of-state, those who would deny the value of the Nation as a place to thrive. The clever bit has been to get the plebeian masses to not rally against the bizarre ‘rules’ of newspeak, Net Zero, DEI and so forth but to rally against breaches of these perverse ideas : wrong pronouns is a thought crime, wrongthink in staff canteens is career terminating folly, challenging gender dysphoria means you’re a fascist running dog and to go un-masked is to be a granny killer. It’s been an extraordinary journey into an anti-reality existence arising from a confected alien ideology that has masterfully over-ridden the natural processes of evolutionary social dynamics. At some point it’s going to implode but for how long can the masses put up with this insanity? Maybe time to keep yer powder dry.
Yes, it’s something that has been pushed, but in a decentralised and dispersed way - as is generally the way of things. There is a herd-like mentality that is very difficult to grapple with, or argue against.
“……The adoption of the name ‘the Yookay’ is therefore to be understood as an entirely natural counterpart to the country’s re-appropriation, by a new governing regime, and thus a new set of distributions and divisions and a newly productive economy….”
To give substance to your claim, this new “governing regime” has taken upon itself to rename ‘His Majesty’s Government’ - where the Monarch is the ultimate representative of the People even where Parliament and the Executive fails them - to now be officially referred to as ‘The UK Government’. I kid you not!
Sadly we have an impotent Monarch who has embraced a broader definition of ‘the People’ which includes anybody with their feet on this land, no matter how they got here or where they came from.
Similarly, Starmer, the fuckwit kludge, calls the government "My Government". No it is not. It is the current Monarch's privilege to say that. I am sure is is deliberate. If Charles had any balls he would publicly chastise him. Mum would have.
Oh we are a fallen nation.
A rose by any other name ...
As you will know, our credentialled classes have also been busy renaming Eskimos, Calcutta, Peking and so on, but not Rome, Brussels or Munich. I do hope our friends in the EU aren't offended.
The currently popular character Amelia pointedly refers to us as Britain, British and Brits and perhaps it's a sign that the tide is turning. I'm hoping we've passed peak Yookay - that's sooo Tony Blair now, y'know.
And yet T Blair, immersed as he was in the new regime, himself used the slogan, "New Labour, New Britain". So perhaps he was riding a wave of change rather than driving it.
"...late-19th century peasants suddenly having to think up surnames for themselves and their families on the spot".
Very interesting! I remember, long ago, reading somewhere that when the English compelled the Welsh to take English surnames, they struck back satirically by agreeing that as many of them as possible would become Jones, Williams, or some other stereotyped name. This had the effect of somewhat countering the English desire to make them uniquely identifiable. Hence the prevalence of "Oh no, he is Jones the post, you want Jones the fish".
One of your shortest yet most insightful pieces.
This brings something new to my thinking that I had not previously thought about or considered.
Perhaps my metaphor (and I do like a good metaphor) is renaming or naming is a bit like a new lock on something, and the 'key' word shows you accept your vassal position. Enthusiastic usage is swearing the new oath of allegiance.
Yes. Language has power.
"UK" is Newspeak.
Very interesting essay. This is of course a key tool of the coloniser. Brian Friels play Translations deals with this in the Irish context and the first OS in 1833.
So the Yookay is another way of disconnecting the physical reality of soil and people into a rootless legal abstraction and thus handing more control to the technocratic/managerial elite. But they are just doing here what they did elsewhere first.
Yes!
This isn’t a process based on a ratchet mechanism. There’s nothing to stop anyone reverting to the use of Britain as the name of our country. And if that usage is associated with values of pride in place and nationhood, the somewheres not the anywheres, it will find purchase in the same way UK did, and for similar reasons: fashion plus preference.
I agree, and disagree. I do my best to use Britain, British, etc. But the change has been rapid and pronounced. I am not sure if there is something Canute-like about pretending otherwise.
Wasn’t old Cnut demonstrating humility?
I think the terms were interchangeable until the EU changed our national vehicle designation to UK and our craven, useless government accepted it to grease the wheels for another “reset” that probably left us in a worse position than before.
The logo on certain T-shirts - FCUK - certainly has a deeper allusion after reading Dr McGrogan's article. A country that's now fcuked. Pronounced 'fooked'.
Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons could have produced a tunic emblazoned with the logo CNUT to indicate what sort of man this Danish overlord really was. And to indicate the sort of change in the territory that this dynasty signified.
During the several centuries of the Norman kings, the Anglo-Saxon Christian names were largely replaced by those of different origins.
Over the same period, there are a couple of other nomenclature shifts that I found jarring in the speed and apparent disingenuousness with which they were taken up: subject to citizen, and politicians to political class. Some might say the shift to “political class” was initially supposed to be derogatory and referred to Peter oborne’s book “the triumph of the political class” but it swiftly seemed to become the accepted collective noun.
I know that the legal move away from “British subject” began in the post war period and cemented legally in the 1980s, but it didn’t really break through until Brown in the late New Labour years.
Both of these name changes had the effect of shifting the sense of relationship between the people and the state.
This coincided with the near collapse of the global financial markets and the declaration in various speeches by almost all major world governments/leaders that they were ready for a new world order. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but just saying….
Good point about ‘political class’!
I think Nigel Farage can be credited with popularisation of the term "political class". But I think it refers to something different from "politicians". It includes journalists, opinion formers, civil servants,those with power, a ruling elite.
I suppose Mr Farage didn't want to use the term "ruling class" as it would make him sound like an old fashioned communist!
Yes! Every so often I drop in a subversive 'I'm a subject not a citizen' with my friends, and then retreat with popcorn...
you're absolutely right about the importance of naming. I live on the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic Archipelago, in the territory of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and I never refer to it any other way. Works for me.
Added to which, we all used to be proud Britons. Now we're just "Brits".
Also, the Queen was known universally as the Queen of England, not the Queen of Britain. We hadn't had a British Queen since Boudicea. So arguably the country that was replaced, for the great majority of people, was England, not Britain.
There was a push in the EU for the following shorthand to be used: UKe for England, UKw for Wales etc. Note the use of lower-case for the name of the nation, degrading it yet further. Perhaps they're still using that shorthand, I don't know.
"...the Britain that some of us remember is gone and that the Yookay has killed it".
Thanks! That corresponds exactly to my feelings, which I previously was unable to understand clearly.
By the way, it also helps to explain the peculiar usage of the name "Europe", which is universally deemed a continent along with Asia, Africa, North and South America, Antarctica, and perhaps Australia.
Of course Europe is unique among "continents" in being a rather insignificant part of another continent - Asia. If Europe deserves the title of "continent", so do - for instance - India and Arabia. Alaska, anyone? Patagonia?
I have the same visceral objection to "Yookay National" as the Scots have to being referred to as British. Britain ...ok, the island has a name. The British....or Britisher, more nuanced. The English, being a conglomeration of the descendents of numerous races, including some from continental Europe and Scandinavia, chose the less racist 'Britsh' denomination. The Welsh could be Welsh and still be British without loss of identity. The Scots were ever Scots and frankly object to being categorised equivalent to the mongrels and miscegenated people to the south. Yet, yet, a proportion of the Scots want a return to the EU? Not proper, old school Scots surely? No unification with the Briton+European/Scandi England/Wales but unification with the vast melting pot of Europe (East & West). Strikes me there is deliberate mischief being done to us all. YooKay is just the superficial sign.
Curtis Yarvin on the mechanical aspects of change:
“Power is habitual obedience; Regime change is a structured discontinuity in the habits of obedience. It must never be forgotten that regime change is a change to obeying something else.”
Now his judgement on just what this new Nomos pertains. Nomos meaning laws or standards or as per this author “spacial order” :
“So you ask your Priest: if not God King and Church what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so thinking logically you became a Satanist. This probably happened to you except it wasn’t a priest but a guidance counselor. The way the world works, never changes.”
Not optimistic but funny.
I say we have traded in our lovely old cultural ways that make life livable for ….a void.
Patrick Deneen:
“Christendom morphed into liberalism and the failure of liberalism is that a truly liberated people belongs nowhere And is attached to nothing.”
My fellow Canadian Marshal McLuhan opened his book Understanding Media with what must be the most enormous proclamation ever (the temerity!):
“ After 3000 years of explosion by means of mechanical and fragmentary technology, the Western world is imploding.”
Stick that yer pipe and smoke it:lol!
Our goodly author has done a service by explaining the “UK” parlance as a way of seeing this change to a new spacial order that washes over us. But it’s the same everywhere. Curious. Maybe the force acting on us is quite large:
“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns . We are suddenly eager to have things and people express their beings totally.” McLuhan on why all previous patterns must collapse, and his famous global village quip.
Why everywhere at once and can we stop this erosion?
Answer: no. Our author says as much, he comes at the same conclusion. We can’t stop it. This analysis is not the end point but just the beginning. A brand new beginning. I’m not sure where this will lead us, but I think it might be…..to hell on earth.
How true. “there is no going back” - I hope and pray you’re wrong about that.
Interesting that we don’t yet have an adjective to go with the noun United Kingdom in the way we do with Britain and British.
If asked what your nationality is you can’t (yet) answer UKish; you would still, I think, say British, or English, Scottish or Welsh. The gradual evolution has a little way to go yet! Maybe the proud traditions of the non English nations are our last line of defence.
In the meantime I have made a note to self never to catch myself saying U.K. when Britain, or even Great Britain when I want to make a point, would be the mot juste.
Yes, Scottish and Welsh people have far fewer hang ups about this kind of thing…
Converting ‘Britain’ to the Yookay may not have been a defined policy but it has certainly been brought about by stealth and deliberate intent by the self appointed Elite, the “un-Brits” who have infiltrated every organ-of-state, those who would deny the value of the Nation as a place to thrive. The clever bit has been to get the plebeian masses to not rally against the bizarre ‘rules’ of newspeak, Net Zero, DEI and so forth but to rally against breaches of these perverse ideas : wrong pronouns is a thought crime, wrongthink in staff canteens is career terminating folly, challenging gender dysphoria means you’re a fascist running dog and to go un-masked is to be a granny killer. It’s been an extraordinary journey into an anti-reality existence arising from a confected alien ideology that has masterfully over-ridden the natural processes of evolutionary social dynamics. At some point it’s going to implode but for how long can the masses put up with this insanity? Maybe time to keep yer powder dry.
Yes, it’s something that has been pushed, but in a decentralised and dispersed way - as is generally the way of things. There is a herd-like mentality that is very difficult to grapple with, or argue against.