The 'Yookay' Experiment

For the best argument against multiculturalism, just look around.

When thinking of England, one may imagine cosy villages nestled inside rolling verdant hills, old stone forts dating back to the first Roman settlements under overcast skies, streets lined with red phone boxes and red double-decker buses, people queuing in the morning for their tea and scones. Stereotypical as they may be, not long ago, this was what came to define most of the United Kingdom, an island renowned for its adherence to order, discipline and good manners, with cherished traditions and a shared identity confidently evoked by the citizens in their everyday customs. It was fertile conditions like this which gave the world Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien and many other great writers and scholars that graced language and culture.

Enter instead the modern UK: rucksacked Deliveroo cyclists in convoy, swarming along road and pavement. Tattered, pockmarked high streets, enlivened only by phone repair 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. The grubby successor state to the country once known as Britain, now possessed by third-world immigrants, alien cultures and mounting anarchy.

Rather than an organic process happening naturally over decades, however, the multicultural transformation of Britain was spearheaded by think tanks and editorials, birthed in Whitehall and then disseminated across the country in large bursts. No warning was communicated to the people already living there. Their objections were overruled and it was calculated that since the people would never accept such a drastic change willingly, the only way in which such a paradigm shift could occur was through force.

Born from the late 1990s, when the country first opened its doors to embrace the world’s masses, the Yookay is a distinctly Blairite experiment, a petri dish interested more in destroying something beautiful than creating something new. Forget the invasion of Iraq, the Good Friday Agreement or even devolution, this rapid demographic shift is the true lasting legacy of Blair - his magnum opus, if you will. Multiculturalism imposed from the top down by a man with a messiah complex, drunk on delusions of grandeur, wanting to sear his mark on British society anyway he could, even if it meant striking a match on gasoline.

When it emerged as the guiding organisational principle of the British state, multiculturalism was sold, in the words of the hugely influential Parekh Report, as “perhaps the country’s biggest single national advantage”. The arrival of peoples from all over the world, bringing with them their unique perspectives, cuisines, religions, dresses, and cultures, would allow Britain to move on from “a narrow, English-dominated backward-looking definition of the nation” into something altogether more vibrant and exciting. Multiculturalism was to “widen a society’s range of options and increase its freedom of choice, for it brings different cultural traditions into a mutually beneficial dialogue and stimulates new ideas and experiences”. All those within society would thereby gain the opportunity to escape the narrow constraints of the culture they happened to be born into, instead becoming free to choose from the plethora of practices they would encounter every day, in doing so creating all sorts of dynamic new cultural mixes.

Envisioning a rich tapestry of cultures interwoven with shared communal bonds, the Blairite managerial class took no heed of the dissenting opinions, the fears that such rapid change could alienate those not consulted, and remolded society through the lens of their utopian vision with dictatorial conviction. To them, the ends justified the means. As they saw it, history would vindicate them as pioneers, rejuvenating a Britain conditionally stunted, unable to achieve political or economic maturity because of its innate conservatism. The entire system would have to be dismantled before it could be rebuilt.

Though his time in office ushered in the first wave of migrants, Blair’s greatest success lay more in the way he was able to dictate the terms of the following governments, who would go on to treat his guiding principle almost akin to religious doctrine, infallible and incorruptible, the new Gospel from which every policy and every decision would be measured against. A new boundary had been drawn. Even the Conservatives, despite their performative outrage, were destined to carry on the legacy they had inherited. There would be some push back, yes, but it would only amount to trivial bureaucratic tinkering. The new order had been firmly established.

“A million poor wretches, armed only with their numbers...ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West” - The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail.

A quarter of a century later, many of the predictions from the Parekh report have come true, though perhaps not in the way the author originally envisioned. The hope that multiculturalism would transform a nation that was grey, drab and bland into something better, more exciting and colourful, never quite materialised. Instead, Britain remains just as grey (it turns out multiculturalism could do little about the weather) and those drab cityscapes have remained just as dreary, even with the injection of halal butchers and fried chicken shops.

The exciting new aesthetic quality underpinned the appeal of multiculturalism, as the very best the cultures of the world had to offer would descend upon Britain, injecting some much-needed dynamism into a turgid and tired society, enlivening Britain into a vibrant global marketplace. Yet rather than delivering something akin to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Britain increasingly resembles the low-grade commercial sprawl, devoid of taste or order, that can be found throughout the developing world. The promise was exciting new experimental fusions of disparate cuisines; in practice, the culinary fusion most commonly on offer in high streets across Britain is that of the Turkish kebab with American fried chicken, sometimes with Italian pizzas thrown in the mix for good measure. Instead of high streets full of exotic shops selling Persian rugs or Moroccan spices or French delicatessens, we get an incomprehensible number of vape shops and Turkish barber shops of dubious legality. Once mysterious religions that enthralled Anglo-orientalists have been thoroughly demystified, reduced to rackety dawah stands obnoxiously blasting nasheeds amidst backdrops of decaying commercial centres.

It’s not so much the mere existence of people of foreign origin but more the way in which they proliferate like an aggressive strand of bacteria, consuming everything in their path until the wider community is corrupted into something unrecognisable from what came before it. Rather than integrate, the arrivals force their new home to adapt and change to accommodate them in a form of reverse assimilation, which has been the biggest driving force behind the yookay-ification. A subversive mutation.

Perhaps the best encapsulation of the discrepancy between the high hopes for multiculturalism and deeply underwhelming reality is within the sonic realm, with the soundtrack of multicultural Britain becoming drill music, a genre which came to existence as a way for gang members to boast about murdering their rivals. Moral panics about popular music genres are nothing new, but those of previous eras concerned with the supposedly subversive and dangerous influence of groups like the Rolling Stones or Sex Pistols now seeming laughingly quaint in comparison to songs created for the purpose of gleefully recounting murders and mocking their dead victims’ mothers over thumping beats that all too often assaults the senses in Britain’s public spaces.

Accompanying these aesthetic changes are issues far more profound that affect innate human needs for belonging, social bonds, and a sense of dignity and pride. The aesthetic transformation of Britain has created a world that is increasingly bizarre and discombobulating, lacking any sense of familiarity or continuity.

The most mundane tasks become an experience of alienation and dispossession. Quotidian interactions that establish a local sense of belonging, like having a brief chat with a shopkeeper or receptionist, become reduced to their utilitarian minimum, lacking in the sufficient language skills or common cultural touchpoints to advance beyond a few ritualistic grunts. The ambient sound of local transport becomes a cacophony of indecipherable languages, with even the adverts making you feel out of place, encouraging you to enjoy some gupshup or give money for Zakat, whatever that means. All add to a profound sense of alienation and isolation, like your home is no longer something you can recognise or even understand. You are forced to become a stranger in your own area, where your surroundings become meaningless and devoid of anything to which you can feel personal attachment.

This is the reality of actually-existing-multiculturalism, a world of endless chicken shops and Turkish barbers, of constant unfamiliarity, estrangement, and alienation, of a common language flattened of its regional varieties into a crude Multicultural London English ‘pidgin’. This is a vision of Britain that no-one seriously defends, let alone champions as a positive model for the future. Multiculturalists cling onto a fictitious vision of what multicultural Britain should be, what they wish it to be, whilst understanding very little about what it actually is. Slogans about diversity being a strength and multiculturalism making Britain a more exciting place to live ring hollow in contrast to the tattered reality it has brought about.

When a multiculturalist seeks to defend their views, they should be bluntly confronted with the society they have created. There is no point speculating about the “mutually beneficial dialogue [and] new ideas and experiences” it might bring; instead, just look around. Go to those areas of Britain where multiculturalism has been most totalising — take a trip to Luton, Newham, or perhaps Slough — and question: “is this the kind of society I want to live in? Is this better than what came before? Is this better than the alternatives?”