Britain has become a meme.

Twenty years ago, it was still the floppy charms of Hugh Grant that served to frame American impressions of this distant province within its imperium.

Notting Hill England still lived, alongside other cliches.

But in the past twelve months, the varnish has truly rubbed off in the minds of many foreign spectators.

Thanks in part to ardent anglophile Elon Musk, Britain has become renowned for its anti-speech surveillance state, its ethnic grooming gangs, its vast levels of unintegrated mass migration, and its general air of economic sag.

Today, that impression risks becoming dominant. In the public mind. Online, the United Kingdom has become known Yookay - a creole spelling — denoting a garish and alien country, hermit crabbing in the ashes of old England.

This unwelcome image change poses several questions:

Questions about its overall truth, which is of course a refraction of online discourse.

Questions about ho the political class are dealing with a society in obvious decline - and how much of this reality they can even accept.
Then, about the power of Britain to change itself.

Is what is happening here a deep, almost ethnogenic endpoint of one kind of society? Or is it simply a call to get our house in order?

Gavin Haynes, a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, is joined by David Frost, Lord Frost of Allenton, who is himself senior fellow here at the Danube Institute.