Once again, momentous events are afoot in the world. The US and Israel appear to be on the verge of toppling the pseudo-constitutional order in Iran, and the Iranians in turn are launching whatever they can get at any target within reach. Naturally, this means that British politicians and commentators desperately need to find something irrelevant and parochial to talk about instead.
Yesterday, it was the turn of British people in Dubai. There are British expatriates, posted workers, tourists, business travellers, diplomats and other sundry visitors scattered across the affected region in their many hundreds of thousands. But it is those in one specific constituent of the United Arab Emirates who became the focus of Monday’s trivia. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey rose in the House of Commons to say that it was time such people “paid tax” if the UK was going to spend public money on their protection. Many others across the political spectrum joined in. Susannah Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, chimed in to describe UK nationals in Dubai as tax evaders who had avoided paying for public services like “the government coming to get you”.
Over the previous 24 hours we had seen images of plumes of smoke rising from the Gulf’s largest entrepot, with drones being intercepted dramatically above the city’s famous skyline. Even for those of us who are more used to the Middle East’s more troubled parts, it was disconcerting to see the illusion of security shattered in what many of us had thought of as the nearest secure bolthole. But among much of the British commentariat, there was a real air of glee about it all — along with a degree of salivation at the humbling of those British nationals who had been foolish enough to imagine they could simply wander off the range.
Much of this speculation was straightforward nonsense based on a complete lack of understanding of how and why government-managed evacuations happen. Governments evacuate their citizens from foreign countries generally under one of two sets of circumstances. The first is precautionary — if it appears likely that the situation in a country is deteriorating, governments may consider putting on charter flights to encourage their people to leave, in order to reduce the amount of consular assistance they have to provide if or when circumstances become more difficult. These are usually accompanied by warnings that the government is likely to be unable to provide further consular assistance later on, and that it is essentially the “last chance” to get out. In many cases, failure to heed such warnings voids regular travel insurance, and only the more hardened visitors with independent contingency plans remain.
The second scenario is a real emergency, in which the security situation in a country has collapsed to the point that normal ground operations at airports have ceased functioning, and commercial flights are impossible. This may be because of a war, or potentially a natural disaster. In the former scenario, airports can become highly dangerous as large numbers of local nationals try to flee, including members of whatever government is collapsing, which makes them a target. Civil airspace management is also likely to have broken down in this type of situation. This means that a foreign country wishing to extract its nationals is going to have to put on a military operation, using a combination of airforce and requisitioned commercial aircraft. Given the huge pressure of people trying to get out in these circumstances, foreign countries are normally extremely selective about who they will evacuate.
There are two points to make about these sets of circumstances. Firstly, in both types of scenarios, the people who are evacuated — or their insurers or employers — get sent an invoice. People getting on precautionary civilian flights may be asked to pay in advance, or to provide the details of their travel insurance policy. Those getting on an emergency evacuation flight undertaken by the British Government are asked to sign an Undertaking to Repay (UtR) before they board. The second observation is that neither of these scenarios describe the circumstances presently in Dubai, where the political and security situation on the ground remains stable, but the sky is full of rockets and drones. Airspace across the region is completely shut to non-combat traffic, and absolutely nobody is leaving the Emirate by air at any point over the next few days, regardless of their status as a UK taxpayer.
At some point, there will (presumably) be a break in the fighting, to the point that people might consider getting onto a flight if it were possible. The largest and most obvious group of British nationals who are going to want to do that are tourists, who for the most part are fully domiciled UK taxpayers, with travel insurance to boot. And it is tourists and short-term visitors to whom the FCDO will have been most busy providing emergency advice, and assistance to those in distress, over the last few days.
Once it is possible to do so, it may be that the Foreign Office thinks about coordinating charter flights to the UK for those wanting to get home immediately, however Dubai’s status as one of the world’s largest air travel and logistics hubs means that commercial operators are unlikely to need much support. There is no shortage of runways, gates, aircraft, crew, or air-traffic control capability that will need mitigation by foreign air forces. The biggest privation faced by those at the airport is likely to be DXB’s surprisingly disappointing business class lounge.
For those on longer term stays in Dubai, there will clearly be a decision to be made about whether they stay put or go somewhere else. But by default, by the time they are able to make that decision, the immediate threat will have dissipated to some extent. Missile strikes and drone interceptions are alarming when you observe or hear them for the first time, and it is unpleasant to live with the ongoing threat of them hanging over you. But once they’ve happened, they’ve happened, and life has a tendency of going back to normal fairly quickly. For some people, the dream may have been shattered and they will go home, but by then, that will just mean logging on to Skyscanner and getting an Emirates flight.
Aside from the rubbish about evacuation flights, there has also been a great deal of rather ill-informed speculation about the sort of British national who has ended up in Dubai. Unlike the rest of the GCC monarchies, such as Saudi, Qatar or the other UAE emirates, Dubai is a commercial entrepot rather than an extractive economy, with a focus on professional services much like London. Although manufacturing actually makes up a similar percentage of Dubai’s economy as it does in Britain. Dubai is where most global companies, including those headquartered in the UK, base their regional headquarters for the entire Middle East. So, while a British company may be busy providing field services for gas extraction in Qatar, or building hospitals in Saudi Arabia, or maintaining Kuwaiti air force jets, the company’s operations in the region will be overseen by staff based in their Dubai office.
Dubai is a critical facilitator of much of the UK’s export activity
Furthermore, there are many people working on operations across the region, either for UK firms or as UK-domiciled contractors, who use Dubai as a fall-back position. There are tens of thousands of British personnel, for example, working for British, US or European companies in the oilfields around Basra, but who for obvious reasons cannot live there. Dubai’s air hub makes it the natural place for many people doing that kind of job all across a dangerous region, to base themselves while they are off shift.
All of this is to say that Dubai is a critical facilitator of much of the UK’s export activity. The British nationals working there do so not because they were desperate to “defund our NHS”, but because that’s where their company sent them. There are also others who have gone to work for large Emirati companies directly, especially its airline and its banks. To put it mildly, this has not been discouraged by the British government over the years, and creates genuine links and trust between the UK and a significant export market.
Not that you’d be aware of any of this listening to the way that many in the UK talk about it. As far as most of Britain’s commentariat seem to be concerned, British citizens living in Dubai are a bunch of wannabe social media “influencers” with too much plastic surgery and lurid dental work. Furthermore, they are simply fleeing to avoid Britain’s eye-watering marginal tax rates. Strangely, plenty of this criticism seems to be coming from people who do agree that Britain’s taxes are far too high.
Elsewhere, hand-wringing about tax exiles getting consular assistance they haven’t paid for has come from precisely the same group of people who thought that dual nationals or even non-nationals ought to have been evacuated in previous emergencies. During the 2023 evacuation of foreign nationals out of Sudan, Rishi Sunak’s government was panicked into evacuating dual nationals with Sudanese citizenship, in clear contravention of diplomatic protocol, following outrage and accusations of racism from many of the same people who are now begrudging the merest possibility that mono-national British citizens may be given help. This seems at best to be an extremely selective application of the principle that people must never be afforded any taxpayer-funded benefit they haven’t paid into.
Life in Britain is not as good as it should be, because we have been badly governed
We rightly criticise “class war” and “the politics of envy” when the Left do it, but the Right seems to have a complete blind spot when it comes to class-based resentment at the possibility of those whom commentators regard as their social inferiors doing better than themselves. And much of the criticism of Dubai-based Brits over the last couple of days has been marinated in that sentiment. Dubai is brash and supposedly lacks culture, because it is recently built and is materially well-provided for. As if your average UK-based electrical engineer or accountant is going to see experimental ballet or post-modern art installations every weekend.
Life in Britain is not as good as it should be, because we have been badly governed. Wages have stagnated, taxes have risen, electricity has become unaffordable, industrial jobs have disappeared overseas and our towns and cities have become deeply unappealing places to spend time. The fact that those with the initiative to do so still have the ability to leave for better-managed places creates some minimal pressure on the political class to at least manage national decline, rather than let the place collapse completely. Those of us who are staying put and hoping for better days ahead, have nothing to gain by casting those who have decided to try things elsewhere for a while as prodigal sons.
