Yookay: The Dystopia We're Already Living In

I recently watched the film The Lives of Others, which, as you probably know, is set in the German Democratic Republic, and which, for some reason, is about as hard to get hold of as ‘subversive’ Western literature was during that regime.

I ended up having to order it on DVD. Remember those? For Zoomers, they were like small plates that you had to put into a little cupboard to make your films come on. Luckily, I had already bought a mini DVD player for the purpose of watching films that stubbornly refuse to be streamable in my ‘region’, as if I live in the Arctic amongst the Inuit, rather than in one of the world’s major financial centres.

There was a panicked moment where I thought I had bought the German version, and a second panicked moment when I realised there were English subtitles, but I’d lost the controller I needed to navigate the menu and turn them on. I’m simply not used to the world of physical objects.

When I finally got it working I was, as the kids perhaps still say, blown away by the movie. Yet on another level, I was furious. Furious, that is, with our own nascent attempts to imitate the appalling communist regime in the emergent Yookay.

Yes, I understand the film isn’t completely accurate and employs artistic licence. And yes, bothering Allison Pearson in her dressing gown can’t quite compete with 24 hour surveillance of comprehensively bugged homes, or carefully typed up reports of every argument with one’s girlfriend. Our Regime is as incompetent as it is sinister.

But still, there are similarities. The fear of speaking one’s mind, the knocks on the door looking for subversive literature (‘Brexity’ books, anyone?). With allegedly more speech arrests than China and Russia (12,000 a year as of September 2025, according to the Telegraph) we are well on our way to imitating the paranoid, moronic, yet highly destructive state portrayed in the film.

We, too, have had suicides. Peter Lynch springs to mind, the man who killed himself in prison, a victim of Starmer’s two-tier terror following the horror of the Southport murders.