From “lanyardians” to “Yookay”, the strange new language of Britain’s right

If you tell your supporters that they’re part of a “silent majority” for long enough, a lot of them will start to believe you. The problem facing Reform UK – and the broader UK right in general – is that just saying it doesn’t make it true.

A recent study by YouGov shows the scale of the problem: Reform UK voters are far more likely than those of any other party to wrongly think they have public opinion on their side, when in reality they do not. Conservative voters are in second place, with Green, Lib Dem, and Labour voters well behind.

Large numbers of Reform voters believe that the 2024 rioters across England “had legitimate concerns” and think a majority of the British public agree with them on that. They do not.

Similarly, many Reform voters think the UK was right to leave the EU, that it’s too difficult for businesses to sack people, that the Covid lockdowns were wrong, and people should not be able to change their gender. They think the public agrees with them on all of those issues – and yet, on each of them, they are in the minority.

Thanks to their media diet – whether that’s GB News, the Daily Mail, Facebook or X – Reform’s voters have become convinced that their opinions are far more widely held than they actually are. For all the endless worry about young people’s use of social media, or liberal filter bubbles, it is Reform’s older, conservative voters who are the most out of touch with the UK as it actually is.

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But even if British right-wing voters are increasingly out-of-touch with reality – and more out-of-touch than their left-wing counterparts – that’s nothing compared to the politicians and commentators at the forefront of the movement, who, radicalised by the online culture wars, are increasingly embroiled in ever-more bizarre fixations.

On a virtually weekly basis, there is either a new piece of terminology everyone feels obliged to use, or else a previously widely used one that is suddenly reviled – a right wing mirror to the kind of language policing the same people endlessly complained about from Woke 1.0.

One recent bust-up on X highlights the levels of right wing language policing at play. Historian Dominic Sandbrook complained that a term was “lanyardian” – a reference to the term “lanyard class”, which originated on X and which is now deployed liberally by politicians and columnists alike.

To those who use the term, the “lanyard class” is a shorthand for the professional middle classes, or at least the ones they don’t like – social workers, HR staff, professors, journalists (except their mates), and the like.

In the actual world, though, people from all kinds of professions wear lanyards. Almost everyone in the NHS, from care workers to hospital porters, needs them. Many factory workers wear them, as do security guards. In most office buildings, everyone from the cleaners to reception staff to CEOs wear them. Only someone deeply out of touch with the world of work would actually believe wearing a lanyard signified membership of an out-of-touch elite.

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The “lanyardian” reference, though, wasn’t even the weirdest thing about Sandbrook’s post. That honour belongs to the idea he was attaching it to.

Apparently, referring to the country in which we live as “the UK”, instead of “Britain” is “lanyardian”, “lawyerly and dry”. GB News presenter Tom Harwood has decided it “irks” him whenever “people call this country UK rather than Britain”.

Whatever its advocates say, this objection to the word “UK” has come almost from nowhere: it has been the most common way to refer to this country since at least 1980, and was cheerfully used by every prime minister from Thatcher onwards. Indeed, when Nigel Farage was looking for a new name for what used to be the Brexit Party in 2020, he settled on… Reform UK. But still, perhaps Farage himself is unacceptably woke now.

Meanwhile, others on the right use the dismissive term “Yookay” to describe what they see as modern Britain’s decline. It is supposed to represent how multicultural Londoners pronounce the term.

Britain’s right seems confused even more than they seem angry, and it extends far further than mere online trivia and terminology. Increasingly, it seems like the politicians running the Conservative, Reform and even Restore parties are unsure of what they’re supposed to be standing for, other than triggering the libs.

Law and order has been a longstanding value of the right, but ever-larger swathes of it seem to find themselves on the side of lawlessness – struggling to condemn riots and pogroms, or even to keep a cordon sanitaire around convicted criminal Tommy Robinson.

Individual politicians seem even more confused. Reform UK politicians warn about the dangers of Sharia law to the UK, or the Islamification of Britain fundamentally changing its culture – Matt Goodwin in particular has ceased dog-whistling on these points, and now just blasts a foghorn instead – even as the party’s deputy leader splits his time between Dubai and the UK.

Even as the right tries to tap into populist anger against mainstream politicians, relying on public anger against politicians cosying up to donors and accepting freebies, Nigel Farage is embroiled in a row over a £5 million gift that makes even the MPs’ expenses scandal, duck houses and all, look quaint.