Britain Against the Yookay: Nation Against Empire

Philip Cunliffe identifies the source of the increasing fragmentation of British politics and society in the imperial structures of the state, and its long experience of relying on devolved government and sectarianism to frustrate the national self-determination of the colonised. 

We live in the Yookay. Everyone instantly recognises their lives and surroundings in the social media memes displaying the decay of twenty-first century Britain – graffitied and aged public transport, rubbish-strewn streets in towns with boarded-up shop fronts, a supposedly national health service advertising its amenities in multiple foreign languages. Everywhere, the signs of sub-national, sectarian and transnational identification abound – trans pride flags, Palestinian flags, Ukrainian flags, both women and men swaddled in conservative Islamic garb, throngs celebrating Pakistani or Albanian national days, and the flood of cheap, abundant illegal labour in the ubiquitous food delivery riders zipping across pavements in towns and city centres. The list goes on. 

Lord David Frost traces the onomatopoeic name ‘yookay’ back to the New Labour era of Prime Minister Tony Blair, when the acronym UK began to substitute for ‘Britain’ in public life and discourse. This reflected the effort to splinter the nation under Blair’s drive for devolution, which led to the (re)establishment of sub-national assemblies with devolved powers for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland in place of direct rule from Westminster. The abbreviation of the country’s formal title, the UK, became the more commonplace designation, and one that seemed to fit better for the globalised and fragmented Britain that emerged from this period. It is no accident that devolution corresponded with the era of hyper-globalisation: diluting national sovereignty was intrinsic to the process of transnational integration in this period. 

Yet in truth the roots of the UK/Yookay run deeper than early twenty-first century waves of mass migration or even the late twentieth-century Blairite experiment in devolution. As the Irish-based UnHerd writer Aris Roussinos observed, the festering sectarianism of British society reminds him of longstanding common practice in at least one part of the state, namely the six counties of the northern Irish province of Ulster that fall within the United Kingdom rather than the Republic of Ireland. While Ulster’s cities are renowned for their garish (Catholic) nationalist or (Protestant) Unionist murals, in the mainland Yookay urban political loyalties are now variously signalled alternately by trans-pride, Palestinian flags, or the crosses of St Andrew and St George. 

The comparison is an unsettling one. After all, Northern Ireland is that part of the UK that suffered a brutal war between nationalist insurgents, Loyalist paramilitaries and the British army for decades between the 1960s to the 1990s. Even today, Ulster remains so riven with sectarianism that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA)—the peace settlement that followed the end of the war in 1998—built communal division into the province’s political structures. It did this by constitutionalising sectarian identity politics across the province’s Catholic nationalist minority and its Protestant Unionist majority. The GFA permits members of the Northern Ireland Assembly to designate themselves as Unionist or Nationalist. In so doing, it avoids government by the majority. Instead, the GFA mandates permanent ‘power-sharing’ between these factions by distributing ministerial positions proportionally among the largest parties on each side. 

No Northern Irish parties stand for election elsewhere in the UK/Yookay, and British political parties make no real effort to represent the province’s voters. Intended to substitute violence with voting, this power-sharing arrangement reinforces Northern Ireland’s distinctiveness from Britain, as well as reproducing sectarianism within the government itself. Northern Irish politics is dominated—and frequently paralysed—by intractable questions of cultural identity, such as whether or not to fly the Union flag over municipal buildings. The kind of politics that would divide a British campus or Scottish football stadium dominates public life in the province. With the rest of the UK/Yookay now beset by marches for Palestine, the prospect of yet further repressive legislation to poIice ‘Islamophobia’ as well as demands for devolution for England, it is not difficult to see the future of Britain in Ulster’s present. So what might the history of identity politics in Ulster tell us about the future of the Yookay?

The Ulsterisation of Britain

The uncanny Ulsterisation of Britain goes beyond the spread of post-industrial poverty and urban sectarianism. In many ways, Ulster could be seen as the political incept of the mainland Yookay today. After all, following the partition of the island of Ireland in 1921, it was this province across the Irish Sea that bundled the island of Great Britain up into the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ (the modern UK/Yookay). Northern Ireland also pioneered devolved government long before Tony Blair became prime minister. Between 1921 and 1972, Northern Ireland was unique in the Union for being administered under a devolved regime, the Parliament of Northern Ireland that met in Stormont. The Stormont parliament was mostly left to its own devices by the union parliament in Westminster until the Protestant-dominated government proved incapable of meeting the demands of its Catholic minority for greater rights, leading to the imposition of direct rule from Westminster. Devolution was not the only Yookay political innovation: Northern Ireland also pioneered plebiscitary rule long before the 2016 Brexit vote or the 1997 votes on Scottish and Welsh devolution; the first referendum ever held on British territory was the 1973 Northern Irish border poll, two years before the first ever national referendum, on remaining in the European Economic Community, precursor of the European Union. 

Long before social media, Islamism, mass migration or food delivery apps, there was a part of these islands that was already the Yookay. Today, as dark rumours of civil war have begun to crop up in British public debate, the question is how might we escape the spread not just of sectarian neighbourhoods but outright communal violence that would follow the Ulsterisation of Britain? The fact that Ulster pioneered the Yookay tells us that there is a deeper element to national decline than the more recent symptoms commonly identified with that decline. That underlying element is the nature of state power, and specifically the weak authority of the British state that has now spread from Ireland to Britain itself.

Ulster: origins of the Yookay state

Northern Ireland exists because it was the British empire’s answer to the Irish Question: the question of how the institutions of the United Kingdom could be remade to represent the interests of the Irish people. When it became obvious that this was just not possible with respect to the nationalist majority (once that majority had opted for independence from Britain during the 1919-21 War of Independence), Northern Ireland was created in order to allow a small minority of Irish Unionists to remain in the Union. The new Anglo-Irish border was explicitly gerrymandered in order to ensure a Unionist majority in six counties of Ulster. Despite this effort at demographic manipulation, the attempt to carve a Unionist enclave on the island of Ireland created a permanent deficit of political authority. 

For the first 50 years of its existence, the devolved regime that governed the new province based its rule on sectarian discrimination against the Catholic minority in order to bind working class Protestants more firmly to the ruling Unionist elite. Despite the gerrymandered Unionist majority, the Stormont government still had to rely on permanent emergency powers, enshrined in Section 1 of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act 1922. This authoritarian system crumbled in the late 1960s when Stormont tried to suppress young northern Nationalists who had mounted a peaceful campaign for equal civil rights. When Protestant mobs began fire-bombing Catholic areas of Belfast, Irish republicans responded by taking up arms to overthrow the Stormont regime. Suppressing the nationalist rebellion proved to be beyond the capacity of Stormont, and London responded by imposing direct rule in 1972, and deploying the British army on Ulster’s streets. 

During the quarter century of violent conflict that followed, the British military was unable fully to suppress the nationalist rebellion—indeed, the use of force on British territory was itself an indication of how weak British authority was in Ireland. The British state tried to compensate for this weakness by trans-nationalising British rule in Ulster. They did this by trying to draw the government of the Irish Republic south of the border into a power-sharing deal over the North, in the hope that this would defuse nationalist anger. The first such attempt at trans-national rule was the failed 1974 Sunningdale Agreement, then the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, and finally the 1998 GFA. 

Formed under the auspices of the supranational European Union , the GFA allowed for a far greater range of inter-governmental collaboration between Dublin and London in ruling Northern Ireland. To this day, under the terms of the Windsor Framework that governs the province since Britain seceded from the EU, Northern Ireland remains formally part of the Yookay/UK and part of the European Union. It remains under the jurisdiction of the EU and its supreme transnational court, the European Court of Justice – a move that was justified on the grounds that this was needed to preserve the all-Ireland arrangements that supposedly underpin the peace settlement. 

Yookay: the decline of national sovereignty

What all this amounts to is the fact that there is no sovereign state in Northern Ireland. In other words, there is no single, supreme centre of political decision-making and authority that governs the territory. Sovereignty nominally belongs to London, but London accepts EU and Irish oversight in the governing of its own territory. This arrangement is nothing new. For decades, Britain’s sovereignty in Northern Ireland has been a legal formality, its authority compromised, whether by devolution to Protestant supremacy or through condominium with Dublin and Brussels.

This means that there is ultimately no one that the citizens of Northern Ireland can hold to account: without the clear centralisation of political power embodied in national sovereignty, there can be no meaningful democratic representation. The people of Northern Ireland are overseen by parties that claim no political representation beyond the island of Ireland, even though the territory is part of the Union with Britain. They have a monarch in London and a supreme court in Luxembourg, whose laws cannot be changed by any elected chamber anywhere. From its origins in the 1920s, through the devolution deal that enshrined Protestant supremacy and the era of counter-insurgency, to reliance on Dublin and ultimately the permanent entrenching of sectarian identity politics, all these arrangements testify to a political system pulled apart between transnational structures above and sub-national sectarianism below, with no intermediary national level held together by a sovereign core.

The empire comes home 

The weakness of British authority in Ireland reflects Ireland’s status as Britain’s first colony: the social contract of self-government and representation that underpins sovereignty is impossible in conditions of imperialism, which by its nature is predicated on supranational rule and hierarchy rather than nationhood and the political equality linked to citizenship. What the phenomenon of Ulsterisation in the mainland UK/Yookay tells us, is that the old imperial centre of Westminster is de facto treating the mother country itself as a colony. This is an inverted imperialism: it is a model in which the social contract that underpins national sovereignty has been torn up, substituted by policies of divide-and-rule through devolution and the cultivation of sectarian political identities between and within the constituent nations of the UK/Yookay itself. 

There should be no surprises here. There is after all a long legacy of the British empire cultivating and elevating favoured minorities to dilute and check the risk of politically cohesive majorities: Tamils against the Sinhalese in Ceylon/Sri Lanka; Muslims against Hindus in India/Pakistan. Nor were British imperialists averse to importing minorities to dilute larger indigenous populations when necessary – Presbyterian Scots to the plantation of Ireland, Indians to South America, East Africa and Fiji, European Jews to Arab Palestine. The Yookay is the Empire come home, not only in the direct form of mass migration from former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, but more importantly in the structure of rule imposed on Britain itself. Globalism is a mode of rule programmed deep into the organisation of the British state: ethnic favouritism and regional division below complements supranational rule hovering above. With the exception of the mid-twentieth century interlude of the rise and fall of the British nation between the inter-war period and the 1970s, the historic British state was primarily a cosmopolitan and global structure for centuries, devoted to seizing colonial territory, exporting colonists and settlers, overseeing global trade flows and fighting mercantile wars. 

Given this history, nor is it surprising that the British elite welcomed the opportunity to reprise this mode of rule during the late twentieth-century era of globalisation. Although they had no global territory to manage anymore, the rise of global banking centred around the City of London and the process of European integration allowed Britain’s governing class to insinuate themselves into managing globalisation. They evaded their own nation’s growing problems, happily partaking in forever wars for human rights, and efforts to tackle African poverty, to end climate change, to bring peace to the Middle East, to pursue geopolitical rivalry with Russia: every problem was soluble except the domestic ones. The leading British civil servant of this era, Gus O’Donnell, who was Cabinet Secretary to three prime ministers from 2005 to 2011, was unabashed about this. O’Donnell publicly boasted that he saw his role as maximising global welfare over national welfare; a similar sentiment might have been expressed by a committed utilitarian working in the offices of the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Today, as the world economy is reshaped by Donald Trump’s trade wars, European stagnation and decline, and East Asian industrialism, O’Donnell’s neo-Victorian outlook and dilapidated political model is no longer tenable. 

Escape from Yookay

What all this tells us is that the primary problem confronting Britain is political: it is not a matter of new technologies, nor the global labour supply, nor demographic decline and population substitution. Nor is the problem confined to the backward mores of specific immigrant groups, however noxious those mores may be. Rather the problem is one of a mode of globalist and imperial rule being applied to the old metropolitan core of an empire that no longer exists: globalist rule thrives on national disintegration. The migration, the sectarianism and the devolution are all symptoms of the deeper political problem. The upshot of this is that since it is a political problem, it can be tackled politically. The overarching question then is how to extract a new nation of Britain from the decaying shell of the Yookay? How do we answer what TNS has called the British Question, the question of how the institutions of the British state can be remade to represent the interests of the British people.

There is one obvious path for the original Yookay state, Northern Ireland, to escape the Yookay. This is through an option built into the province’s constitution, the Good Friday Agreement. The GFA requires the British government to hold a referendum (‘border poll’) if London believes a majority in Northern Ireland would support reunification with the Republic. Opinion polls show that although a majority in the North still favours remaining in the UK, a significant majority also anticipates reunification taking place in the not-too-distant future. The prospect of a historic reconciliation between Unionism and Nationalism would offer Ireland its own opportunity to transcend the globalist model embraced by the Irish elite as part of their integration into the EU. That task will be for the new Irish nation to decide for themselves. 

Ireland’s reunification would not only provide a final answer to the Irish Question that has plagued the politics of both islands for centuries, but also offers a critical opportunity to answer the British Question—for Britain itself to escape its decadent colonial condition as the Yookay. The gains to Britain itself would be significant. An Irish border poll would not only end the paralysing grip on British policy that the EU continues to enjoy through the Windsor Framework, but also offer the British nation the opportunity finally to abolish the failed devolution experiment in Great Britain too. 

A democratic Britain must be founded upon the political equality of all of its citizens. This requires that all its citizens enjoy the same system of government. Embracing and encouraging an affirmative vote on Irish reunification would allow Britain to extricate itself from the formal constitutionalisation of sectarian politics that the devolved Stormont regime requires. The prospect of an Irish border poll would give us the opportunity to start fully, finally and properly aligning British territory with British sovereignty. It would allow us to put an end to the remnants of the old empire by ensuring that British rule does not stretch beyond the scope of Britain’s popular sovereignty. It would also provide the opportunity and impetus to abolish the failed experiments of Welsh and Scottish devolution too. Supporting Irish reunification is part of the process of reinvigorating the unity of Britain itself. 

The early days of a better nation … 

To be sure, the British people already had their own border poll with Brexit in 2016, when the majority voted for greater sovereignty and border controls—both of which were denied as part of membership in the EU. This choice has been repeatedly discounted by the Yookay’s governments since then, most notably with the so-called Boriswave of mass migration after January 2021. This was the moment that Boris Johnson’s Tories opened the floodgates to migration from outside of the EU—migration always being one easy means of following Gus O’Donnell’s maxim to enhance global welfare at the expense of the nation. Although Britain’s elites have largely spurned the opportunities of national independence offered up by Brexit, the fact that both Labour and Tory governments have explicitly scorned the demands of Britain’s democracy since then has had the salutary benefit of demonstrating to the populace that the old Yookay state is not fit for purpose, acting, as it does, independently of the British people. 

Globalism thrives on the institutional fragmentation of national states. Ending globalism means more than seceding from globalist and transnational structures and enforcing national borders; it also means nation-building. As devolution gouges out the national level of government, it also facilitates sectarianism, which thrives in the interstices created between conflicting and multiple layers of government. Abolishing devolution and its associated layers of parasitic devo-crats would be one means of dismantling the Yookay state and replacing it with a new political system—a new British state. This will help to spur the process of nation-building.

As the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes paradoxically observed, it is not the unity of the citizen body that gives coherence to the sovereign state, but rather the unity of the representative that gives political unity to the represented. It was this intellectual insight that allowed Hobbes to carve a conceptual path upwards and out of what he called the ‘warre of all against all’, the intertwined identity politics and religious forever wars between Catholic and Protestant that plagued early modern Europe, including the Britain and Ireland of his own day. What Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty offers is a means of transcending the globalist politics of divide-and-rule, a means that does not require the state to impose conformity on its citizens or give up on local government, but does require that it is able to cohere and concentrate the will of its people into a single centre of national power and authority. The alternative is the prospect offered up by the Yookay, the identity-based war of all against all.