Why Ukania?
This newsletter will cover a range of issues related to the state of the United Kingdom, its nations and regions. Ukania, a term originally coined by the late Tom Nairn, seems to me the best description of our post-Brexit state - a failing country where too many things no longer seem to work. The traumas of Austerity, Brexit, and Covid - the great ABC of recent domestic crises - have accelerated and compounded long-term problems. International conflicts have exposed further weaknesses. We need to build hope for a better future, which will demand a more resilient state ready to address the climate crisis and other challenges.
Writing nearly forty years ago, Tom Nairn said of Ukania:
The name is appropriate because none of the existing handles quite fit: we live in a State with a variety of titles having different functions and nuances – the U.K. (or ‘Yookay’ as Raymond Williams relabelled it)….’Ukania’ also has the great merit of recalling ‘Kakania’, Robert Musil’s famous alternative name for the Habsburg Empire.
Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, 1988
Nairn makes reference to the notion of the ‘Yookay’ as coined by the late Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams, who died in the year Nairn published that book. Williams had written:
‘Yookay’, of course, is neither historical or cultural; it is a jargon term of commercial and military planning.
Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, 1983.
You don’t have to buy in to the whole of Tom Nairn’s thinking, or his particular approach to historiography formed in alliance with the New Left Review’s Perry Anderson (the Nairn-Anderson theses), and I don’t, to find Ukania a useful term, particularly post-Brexit. I had a few sharp things to say about him around 20 years ago:
The contemporary historian David Edgerton has rightly criticised the declinist assumptions of the Nairn-Anderson theses as historically inaccurate, and warned that they do not provide a useful basis for political action today. But the assorted crises of the period since the financial crash have demonstrated that long-term problems in the state persist, and Ukania is a useful heuristic, or shorthand, for the UK’s multiple crises, or the poly-crisis, as economic historian Adam Tooze has dubbed them.
Challenges to the state.
I research, teach and think about government, politics, devolution, public service leadership and delivery, media and social media. What unites these themes to a large degree is the weakness of the state. My most recent book, Ministerial Leadership, identified something of an all-party consensus on critical problems facing the state, including a failure to plan for the long-term beyond day-to-day political skirmishes, the loss of institutional memory, and a state badly organised for delivery of key policies and programmes. The post-Brexit years have also seen a collapse of public standards and norms, key to ensuring trust in the state and in political life, which I have written about here.
My previous book, Facebook, the Media and Democracy: Big Tech, Small State, identified how the state had ceded power and responsibility to unaccountable Big Tech corporations. While there had been something of a fight-back in the period to the pandemic, even the meagre UK pro-competition regulatory agenda has now been pushed aside by a ‘pro-innovation’ agenda more in line with Big Tech thinking as the AI goldrush takes shape. Further state action is urgently needed.
In 2021, I contributed to some work to a group thinking about Labour’s approach to the state under the umbrella of Labour Together. This article by John Denham and Jon Wilson outlines some of the thinking our Steering Group stimulated. We will see how and if that work is taken forward by a new government.
Posts on this site will draw on my research, my teaching, and my political experience over time. My broad focus will be the weaknesses of the UK state.
While I will seek to post more widely, I have started a sub-theme, Once upon a time in Wales, with a focus on the subject of my next book, the history of the Government of Wales. I intend to post about that as I develop my work.
Join the discussion
I hope you will find these subjects interesting and join the discussion. I do not currently have plans to charge for the newsletter, which at this stage (April 2024) is an adjunct to my academic work. I do not expect that to change for a year or two.
What you can expect
Now that my book Ministerial Leadership is out, I have more time to devote to other projects. Some of the posts will be ‘exhaust’ from my book - material that I just couldn’t fit in!
I aim to publish posts on Welcome to Ukania weekly, with one post about issues related to the state of the UK, and another on the sub-section A long time ago in Wales with my developing thinking for the new book on Welsh Government. So two posts a week, though probably not on the same day.
These will not be ‘hot takes’ on the latest governmental crisis or mis-step. There are plenty of hot take blogs and podcasts out there already. Think of this as ‘slow writing’, going beneath the headlines and looking at longer-term issues - continuities as well as changes.
So welcome to my slow writing space.
Who am I?
I’m Professor of Practice in Public Service Leadership at Cardiff University. Former Welsh Government Minister. Former BBC Head of Public Affairs in London. Former lots of things. I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to change the UK state and make it work better. I care about democracy, activism, culture, public value, technology that works for people not for Big Tech billionaires.
And Cardiff City Football Club. But I promise not to post about that - here, anyway.