There’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever the UK

The world's worst rebrand

Once in a while a well-known company will spend a load of money on a rebranding exercise, only to change their name to something terrible which no one likes or even understands. New Coke is probably the most famous example, but there was also Royal Mail turning into ‘Consignia’, or PricewaterhouseCoopers calling its consulting offshoot Monday, both of which were soon reversed. Why would a company ditch a recognised name and brand just because it wanted to keep up with the times?

Now, imagine an actual country doing that.

‘England’ has deep romantic resonance, immortalised in the canon by authors of poets, but Britain has the majesty of Arthur. ‘Great Britain’ I associate with childhood memories of watching icons like Steve Cram and Daley Thompson winning gold at the Olympics. I vaguely recall that some quite dim politicians and journalists used to object to its use, seeing the great as chauvinistic and seemingly unaware of the geographic reason for the name (because there is a ‘Little Britain’ full of French-speaking Welsh people).

They don’t object these days, largely because few people talk of Great Britain, as David Frost noted in the Telegraph back in June. In its place has arisen ‘the UK’, a rebrand hugely popular with politicians, government agencies and other figures of authority who much much prefer it to ‘Britain’, Great or not.

‘UK’ growth really began after the Second World, and then surged in the 1970s and 80s. There was also the more explicitly Thatcherite ‘UK Plc’, which was coined in the mid-70s and became very popular under the rule of Maggie and Major; Michael Heseltine was especially fond of using it, I seem to remember. UK Plc was a horrendous phrase, and brought to mind SDP politician Bill Rodgers’s line that ‘The Tories think Britain is a business. Labour think it’s a charity. The SDP know it’s a community’. I think it’s far closer to a charity, whoever’s in charge, but he wasn’t wrong.

Since then, the UK has been embedded into British government: the UK Border Agency was established in 2008, taking over from three previous bodies but in particular the Border and Immigration Agency. GB stickers were replaced with ‘UK’ in 2021. The British National Space Centre became the UK Space Agency. In recent years, Parliamentary use of ‘UK’ has surged, too. It’s become so common that the BBC recently referred to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, a civilian fleet supporting the Royal Navy, as the ‘UK Navy’. As you arrive in any airport in Great Britain, you’ll see this ugly combination of letters everywhere, displeasing to the ear and eye, since in the English language words that end in ‘uck’ often evoke feelings of disgust, such as muck, yuck, cuck and, of course, the obvious one.

Great Britain is technically inaccurate as a description of the state, and while Northern Irish feelings are obviously a consideration, the adoption of ‘the UK’ is more driven by cultural and political factors. It’s not just about making it sound more like a corporation or charity; it’s because many of our rulers feel slightly uncomfortable with Britain as a concept, a romantic ideal which might attract dark nationalist feelings. The UK sounds bloodless - and that’s the selling point.

I’m not the only one who feels this way: Peter Hitchens is a long-standing UK hater, and back in 2010 wrote an article in which he mockingly referred to it as the ‘Ukay’. Today it is more popularly known as the ‘Yookay’, a term popularised by the Yookay Aesthetics account, the work of the mysterious Drukpa Kunley,

While Merriam-Webster and the Economist have both named ‘slop’ their word of the year, a worthy winner, in terms of its impact on Britain Yookay is probably the most notable: it has helped to project Britain’s new, unflattering image well beyond these shores, and I even heard Yookay Aesthetics referenced on my recent travels in the US.

The Yookay phenomenon has been discussed on Radio 4’s programme AntiSocial. It appeared in the New Statesman in February. In May, Jonathan Freedland referred to it in a Guardian column criticising Robert Jenrick. It has featured in The Mail and Financial Times. Christopher Caldwell wrote about it in his Claremont Review account of Britain, and Lord Frost mentioned the term in his Telegraph piece, writing how it has come ‘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.’