Dubai is modernity
That is why they hate it so much
I believe the Bard put it best:
“Soon after meeting someone, mention Dubai. If it provokes a smirk, and a jibe at the crassness of the place, that is useful. You can filter that person out...looking down at the city, and at new-money Brits who love “Doobs”, has come to characterise a certain kind of box-ticking, not-very-elite elitism, like having an Elena Ferrante on the go.”
Sneering at people who move to Dubai has, as Ganesh notes, become a fixture of downwardly mobile just-about-still-middle-class British people, whose political champion is Ed Davey. The Liberal Democrat leader, who is possibly Britain’s worst politician, took to the House of Commons yesterday to sadistically demand that British nationals stuck in the Middle East be forced to pay for their own protection. It is not an exaggeration to say that these people are actually enjoying the thought of young White people being terrified of drones with missiles hovering around their hotel, all for having the temerity for choosing to live in sunny Dubai and pay no income tax.
This sort of attitude is not new in Britain, whose people have emigrated to every corner of the globe for the better part of a millennium now. It is precisely the same attitude that the resentful British middle-classes had towards Anglo-Indians towards the end of the 18th century. India, then, was a very dangerous place to move to. Disease risk was appalling, in some years a third of the East India company’s staff would die from cholera, typhoid and Malaria.
But the rewards for this risk were sublime. The territory was awash with gems, gold and ivory. Entire rooms in London Georgian homes were given over to hosting Mughal treasures. The phrase ‘loot’ also enters the English language at the same time, originally a Hindustani slang term for plunder. Another contemporary phrase was ‘Nabob’, which came to be a term of insult used in Britain for brash young men returning from India flush with wealth. Gillray even drew this satire, ‘The Nabob Rumbled’ (1783):
The reason for this resentment is the same now as it was then, the piggish envy of our feudal sub-elites. Back then, these losers mobilised politically to cut off this route for social mobility. The useless cuckold Edmund Burke spent years pursuing Warren Hastings through the courts on false charges of corruption at the end of the 18th century. Whilst this bogus trial was ongoing, another useless aristocrat by the name of Charles Cornwallis – fresh from losing a war against a few American farmers - was sent to India to end the dog days of young men making their fortunes by implementing the ‘Cornwallis Code’, which closed off the old profiteering routes by banning private trade, outlawing accepting gifts and introducing fixed salaries for officials.
My natural sympathies will always be with the emigrants, in part because it requires a certain amount of self-starting and gumption to take such a step in life. Whenever I meet a White South African I assume that they have a higher baseline of general competence than the average White English as they are the descendants of the enterprising voortrekers or uitlanders. Have you ever met a White South African, or even somebody from New Zealand who does not have a driving license past the age of twenty? It’s quite literally impossible to imagine. On the inverse, why do you think the Irish are the way they are? How risk averse would you have to be to not up and leave to the United States, Australia, or at least Britain when that door has been held open for so long? What sort of people are left behind? No small part of my own self-hatred is due to my own failure to make such a leap.
