Dubai is home to a quarter of a million British people: dismayed by our high taxation, poor public services and rain, their numbers swell each year. One of the seven emirates of the UAE, Dubai is a polyglot city, a Babel. Ninety per cent of its residents are from elsewhere. The Gulf expert Christopher Davidson calls Dubai the “ultimate liberal economic city state” with “some of the best physical infrastructure in the region”. He adds: “For many years, it’s provided ongoing political stability, which in the Arab world, and especially the Gulf region, has been in great scarcity.” It has low taxation and cheap labour: that is its lure.
When I went to Dubai I found it disorientating, above all things — capitalism meets tyranny, and I can’t fathom anything worse. They have astounding things — the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building; the Palm Jumeirah, an artificial archipelago created in the shape of a palm tree — and this seems to blind credulous westerners to its reality. Dubai is a dictatorship under Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and he preserves his absolute power as dictators always do: with the repression of all potential threats.
