The Yookay Hellscape
From British Social Realism to the Realm of Chaos Demons

2,160 words

It’s Grim Up North, So Let’s Make a Film About It

Britain is renowned for its social realism, whether it’s the likes of the world’s most disturbingly mundane soap operas, film classics likeThis Sporting Life, books like A Kestrel for a Knave, and plays like Look Back In Anger. Even Orwell’s seriously over referenced Nineteen Eighty-Four has a social realist tone despite its fantastic, allegorical elements, and all too apparent politics.

Anyone who has spent time in, let alone grown up in, a declining industrialized town, might have a fair guess why these sort of social realist portrayals have considerable traction. They reflect a very real situation where the indigenous workers were living in a parlous state thanks to an entrenched class system, industrialisation, Thatcherite deindustrialisation, and the move to a London dominated service economy run by urbanized, global elites with no sense of land or people.

Social realism has long been associated with left-wing politics. The genre with an epic twist was intrinsic to the Soviet Union. To mask the tyranny, deprivation, and mass murder, working people were portrayed as heroes and heroines. In the peripheral areas of the former USSR there are still statues portraying tightly browed, foundry strong proletarians – brass and iron propaganda for Marxist-Leninism. It’s inevitable that the largely Jewish created and led genocidal false utopia designed to homogenize, and by default genocide all peoples and nations, would be so blatant in its propaganda. It was apparently ridiculous though no one was going to tell Stalin that.

Social realism’s British expression was remarkably different from state sponsored Soviet art–propaganda. It took on a more humane lens. Rather than the over-the-top Soviet worker caricature that portrayed every person who had ever picked up a shovel as an epic hero, there was an interest as to how things were for people in their every day lives. The film adaptation Kes looked at a sensitive, animal loving boy in a Northern mining community, This Sporting Life followed the struggles of a rugby league player in a similar locale, while an entire season of the soap, Coronation Street, seemed to feature little more than going down to the shop for cigarettes. This relatively muted, softer form of social realism had a more persuasive tone, as seeing indigenous children living in poverty is impactful in a way the ridiculous Soviet hero–worker never could be.

When reviewing this relatively early wave of social realism, the ethnically coherent Britain elicits the conflicting responses of a delighted nostalgia at how recently Britain was a nation, and horror at how quickly large parts of Britain transformed into the Yookay (a mocking term used for the abomination that is the current United Kingdom). Watching old films from the 1970s, ‘80s, and even into the ‘90s a foreign face was a novelty rather than the dominant and domineering visage that is all too frequently the case now. While Thatcher had gone a long way in destroying working class communities with economic liberalism, and the Labour party was in the process of becoming obsessively anti-white and multikulti, the gates of replacement level mass immigration were yet to be opened in full.

As the communist face of globalism collapsed upon itself there was an inevitable economic and politico–cultural shift away from socialism towards liberalism. And with liberalism came open borders and markets. For all the horror and tyranny of communism, socialism proved less demographically catastrophic than rule of global capitalism for European peoples. Comparing the quality of life in Budapest, Prague, or St. Petersburg, to the gibbering, hostile, tense squalor of London, Paris, and Berlin is all the proof required.

From Working Class Life to the Alienated, Dysfunctional Outsider

With global capitalism’s Cold War victory there was a noticeable change from what previously might have been seen on the screens of art house cinemas. While the previous social realist wave focused on the day to day life of working class Britons, the new wave featured different protagonists, who were delinquents rather than workers, underclass rather than working class, and self–destructive rather than seeking dignity in materially difficult circumstances. This middle period featured a plethora of outsiders rather than those embedded in working class communities struggling with material poverty and class barriers.

This move away from representing the “every days” and “just hanging in theres” to the down and outs is demonstrative of a drive to document the life at the bottom rather than the sort of people who keep things ticking over. They had lost their novelty value for film makers. Working class natives were no longer the cause of the day in art house cinema. Junkies and the messy homeless were this season’s fashion.

Films like Naked and Trainspotting define the period. It was all about a self–destructive descent into a performative nihilism. While the protagonists’ obliteration occurred in a world morally and economically alien to their parents and grandparents, it is was still undoubtedly British, at least in the ancestral and environmental sense.

With the victory of liberalism, the subjects of British social realism moved from often documentary-like representations of the relative poverty of Britain’s workers to a rogue’s gallery of outsiders.

Naked was made in 1993 and Trainspotting in 1996. Though the protagonists are increasingly depraved, unhealthy, and peripheral to the traditional nation they expressed their nihilism in, it was an environment still coherent enough to be familiar. They may be dysfunctional, self–destructive messes, but they were distinctively British, dysfunctional, self–destructive messes. This relative coherence didn’t last for long in the great bulk of Britain, let alone among the underclass.

Thatcher’s liberalization had made life hell for many Britons, though she was savvy enough not to simultaneously flood the country with foreigners. She knew the electoral potential of the National Front. Tony Blair’s New Labour had no such concerns about social cohesion or indigenous well-being in a nation already economically ravaged.

Blair would take office in 1997. His immigration minister, Barbara “My being Jewish informs me totally…” Roche would take up her ministry in 1999. The Blairites and the hostile facsimilies that followed attacked the British ethnic nation as Thatcher had attacked their industry. Large parts of Britain would be transformed into something so antithetical to the historical nation there was little to be realist about. The Sceptred Isle was about to get a makeover only the most obscene chaos god could envision. Blair’s “Cool Britannia” was old British ladies sleeping on winter streets because her council house had been given to foreigners. It was a horrific fraud.

The Yookay’s Grotesque Surrealism: Without a Transcendent Communal Identity, Chaos Fill the Void

As the throngs of non–Europeans flooded into Britain, they began to avariciously feed on and suffocate the authentic nation with a garish tackiness, cosmopolitan superficiality, and relentless deceit. As the Yookay began to grow like a poisonous, vivid fungi on the weakened body politic of Britain, the nation not only declined, but moved towards becoming unrecognisable in its immiseration. Any attempts at resisting the spread of the Yookay were repressed by a regime which functioned as a if controlled by a parasite intent on the death of its host.

While British social realism shifted from the working class to the nihilist outsider without missing a beat, the malignant, stupid, ugly, impoverished, tense malaise that is the Yookay was too grotesque to fit in the genre. The Yookay has proven too much for documentary film makers. The bulk of the tedious, fickle subculture are the sort of midwits who read The Guardian, and any attempt at a realistic portrayal would deeply offend their political views. They were the cheer squad for the replacement of Britain with the Yookay, and the reality of their retarded, utopian dreams has turned out to be a nightmare for indigenous Britons.

Aside from impacting the comfort zone of cosmopolitan liberals, social realism is not the appropriate genre to represent the current decline as there is nothing social or real about the Yookay. Of the extant genres, magical realism is the best fit. It’s a largely Spanish language genre where the supernatural and mundane intertwine. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Field of Dreams (1986) are examples. While it’s not uncommon for magical realism to have sinister supernatural elements, this is still not quite the right genre for anyone wanting to represent the hell realm that is replacing Britain. If there was a genre that was truly appropriate for the Yookay it would have to be new: anti–social surrealism is closer to the mark.

Blacks milling about next to a Buckingham Palace guard.

When a situation becomes so appalling, so cheap, so aesthetically incoherent, not simply unnatural but truly against nature, it takes on a supernatural aspect equal parts sordid, alien, and disturbing. While Man can do horrific things, the sheer awfulness of the Yookay has a distinctly otherworldly quality.

There are three information vectors which have covered the Yookay to some degree: movement and affiliated figures, friendly accounts, and the considerable number of travelogue YouTubers who wander around the vivid squalor of the Yookay understandably aghast at what Britain has become.

Of the movement voices The Lotus Eaters have covered the Yookay in some depth. The definitive X/Twitter account is @MythoYookay which was created by the nationalist satirist @kunley_drunkpa.

Then there are accounts which document the Yookay but in a “positive” light. Pakistani street racers with diamond earrings posing out the side of their uncle’s slop franchise are demonstrative.

Street propaganda as part of a guerilla marketing campaign for clothing brand A-Cold-Wall.

The YouTubers making travelogues of the grimmest parts of the country are usually natives. Their videos generally fall into the later social realist category as they are replete with exiled London East Enders, messy pissheads, malnourished indigenous boys acting hard, and council estates in advanced stages of decline. On occasion, they do step from social realist Britain into the anti–social, surrealist Yookay. When they move from the shuttered high streets of a rough, regional British town degrading into the Yookay, the transition is as if moving from a painting by Daumier into a Boschesque inferno hybridized with the pungent squalor of a slum, with all the performative violence of a drill rap video made on a stolen phone.

Once you’ve left Britain and stepped into the Yookay, the details that define it are all too apparent: It’s erstwhile pubs being refitted as Kurdish barbers to launder heroin profits, it’s native boys in a northern housing estate flashing gang signs, it’s vape shops with Royal Mint levels of security flying Palestinian flags, it’s London art dealers finishing their sentences with ‘innit’, it’s Muslims in taxis serially raping British girls in Rotherham and getting a free pass, it’s paedophiles getting a suspended sentence, it’s a hyena pack of diversity hire girlbosses loudly cheering on a black 007 kicking old white men to death, it’s the Albanian mafia standing over the last British gangsters, it’s Chinese pound shop cashiers offering cut price sex acts on the side, it’s the cats a Nigerian sacrificed to a strange spirit washing up on the banks of the Thames, it’s graffiti that says “no whites” in the park where your granddad played football, it’s tacky strobe lights flashing outside Pradeep’s chain of stores selling knockoff phone cases, it’s masked up drill rappers making videos in front of the police station, it’s the former church were you were baptised blaring out the Muslim call to prayer five times a day, it’s EDL marchers whose great granddads fought in the Somme draping themselves in Israeli flags, it’s the rat colonies in Birmingham living in piles of garbage bags, it’s Kashmiri pop music turned up to 11, it’s British women being arrested for silently praying within a 100 metres of an abortion clinic, it’s bearded body builders in designer tracksuits milling outside of Islamic centres speaking Kurdish, it’s the mixed race road man with gold grills who won’t stop dealing outside your kid’s school, it’s the London police taking direction from the Jewish Shomrim, it’s your veteran uncle who lost a leg in Afghanistan losing his council flat to a 68 IQ Somali with three wives and fifteen kids, it’s the descendants of those who fought at the Battle of Hastings taking “Multicultural London English” at Cambridge, it’s the Indian scammers who ripped off your nan, it’s the lesbian teacher with a visible moustache who told you how hideous Britons are every day at school, it’s Two Tier’s Keir’s kids keeping Jewish sabbath, it’s junkies fighting the roaches for bin scraps down the side of the station, it’s Soros funded NGOs labelling the plasterer with the Union Jack tattoo as a terrorist, it’s the cheap beer and korma vomit drying on the street on a Sunday afternoon. It’s the Yookay, and it’s not even a British hell any more.