A Dispatch from Dalmatia about Dispatches from the Dubai Diaspora

I’m breaking the rules.

I said I wouldn’t, but, I couldn’t help myself.

I’ve been on the Twitter.

While sunning myself in what I can only describe as light with a honey-like texture (nom-nom-nom), my right thumb very accidentally tapped on that black X icon - like a fox knocking over a bin it promised not to touch. In my defence, I made it several days.

Days of salt-crusted swims, limestone cliffs topped with pine trees, boat-deck naps, and enough grilled calamari to qualify for some kind of cephalopod restraining order.

The Dalmatian coast is quite literally a coastline of contradiction: jagged mountains erupting almost rudely from the Adriatic’s glassy blue, ancient towns perched like secrets on the edge of stone, and a sea so clear it makes your shower water look suspicious. Croatia doesn’t just sparkle, it glows.

Which is probably why I shouldn’t have opened the hell-mouth app in the first place.

C’est la vie

There, in between someone’s entirely valid opinion on Gregg Wallace and one of the four remaining Reform MPs doing yet another misinformation, I glanced across one of the screeds from the British Right’s new diaspora - let’s call them the “Dubai Set”.

The commentators who’ve fled Britain not under duress or “political persecution”, but because - ironically - they didn’t feel they were getting enough for their taxes. Or in some cases, just didn’t want to pay them at all.

The ringleaders of this crew are a familiar bunch. Isabel Oakeshott (or as I like to call her, Isab el-Oakeshott), once the voice of righteous indignation at the decline of Britain, now residing in the Emirates to protect her children from… checks notes… British taxes.

Ant Middleton, who managed to turn violence against police into a lifestyle brand, offloaded to Dubai reportedly because of trouble with the taxman.

Throw in a few crypto bros, disgruntled GB News contributors, and novelty Twitter contrarians and you’ve got a full-blown expatriate echo chamber - a sort of sun-drenched Speakers’ Corner where everyone is angry, tanned, and posting.

I will say here that I honestly don’t begrudge anyone for moving abroad. I did. You don’t even need a reason. The weather, the food, the prices, the sheer novelty of it all - fair play, honestly, go for it.

But if you choose to leave a country, plant your flag elsewhere, and then spend all your time spitting venom at the place you just left, I’m afraid we’re going to have a chat.

Especially when your new paradise is… well, Dubai.

There is a profound and hilarious irony in choosing a glittering petrostate as your sanctuary from socialism, while daily blaming socialism for Britain’s decline. The commentators in question are people who routinely and invariably mock the welfare state, rant about lazy migrants, and decry multiculturalism.

What’s never mentioned by our dear sun-drenched interlocutors is that Dubai is a city built, quite literally, by a vast underclass of migrants - mostly from South Asia - who are shipped in to pour the concrete and raise the steel of those gleaming towers, often living in labour camps far from the glitz they’re constructing.

The shimmering skyline itself has been bankrolled not by private ingenuity but by state-controlled oil revenues, channelled into a nationalised wealth fund and used to build an empire of malls, roads, ports and artificial islands.

And presiding over it all is a tightly centralised authoritarian regime that makes Britain’s so-called “nanny state” that they desperately clutch their best pearls over look like an anarchist book club in Cornwall.

Oakeshott and her crew love to bang on about the dangers of “uncontrolled immigration” while sipping an Aperol Spritz in a rooftop bar staffed by a Nepali man working 12-hour shifts, who can’t change jobs without permission and had his passport taken on arrival.

It’s gone so far beyond tone deaf it’s moved into the realm of pure satire.

They constantly accuse Britain of being overrun by outsiders, while literally living as unintegrated migrants in a country where they neither speak the language nor participate in the culture. Which they don’t have to - because Dubai isn’t built for integration. It’s built for transience. It’s a playground for the global managerial class, and a holding zone for the people who keep that playground running.

You could even argue that the whole emirate is what happens when Thatcherism is taken to its logical, glitzy endpoint: no unions, no dissent, no messy democracy. Just glossy towers, regimented order, cheap labour, and strict cultural enforcement. You get the glitz without the grime - but only because someone else cleans it up before you get there.

And oh, the selective amnesia.

For all their anxious Twitter threads about how London is falling apart (it hasn’t) or how the UK has been “destroyed by the woke” (not really) you’d think they’d mention that their new home restricts press freedom, jails dissidents, and only in the past few years legalised unmarried cohabitation. Which I’m sure was a huge relief for many of them, given the Venn diagram of divorce, side-hustles, and moralistic hypocrisy.

None of this is meant to castigate Dubai itself. The city is massively intriguing in its own right - an architectural hallucination with a fascinating history of trade, migration, and ambition. But it’s also not a Randian utopia floating in the desert, proof that a world without government handouts or immigration “burdens” is possible.

Because it’s neither.

It’s a city made possible only through immigration and oil wealth - both of which are strategically managed by a centralised state. And yes, that includes government-built infrastructure, government-funded housing, and vast public spending - just not on the people tweeting.

So when Isab el-Oakeshott lectures us on how the UK should “take a leaf out of Dubai’s book,” what she really means is: let the rich keep their money, and make everyone else invisible.

It’s also extremely telling how these self-styled champions of British values are the first to abandon Britain the second it stops catering to them.

They want tradition, but only if it comes with a tax break.

They want freedom, but only from criticism.

They want law and order, but not if it includes HMRC asking questions.

They say they’re patriots, but they fled the country to complain about it more effectively from a balcony with air-conditioning.

Of course, none of them will ever admit that the Britain they long for - the one they invoke in wistful, Churchillian tones - was built on exactly the kind of state intervention, infrastructure investment, and immigrant labour they now loathe.

The NHS? Socialist.

The railways? Once public.

The schools their parents attended? Heavily subsidised.

The pensions they plan to collect? Still funded by a generation of workers they’d rather see deported.

But none of that fits the narrative, does it?

Anyway, I’m rambling to the point of incoherence now, and the Adriatic is calling again - calm and impossibly blue.

I’ll paddle out on my bright pink unicorn floatie in a minute, past the edge of the cove, past the American couple loudly misidentifying everything as “Greek,” until I find that spot where all I can hear is my own breath and the occasional splash of something silvery darting underneath.

And while I more than likely will be back online tomorrow, for now, I think I’ll float.

No notifications.

No politics.

Just light, salt, and a man pretending to be a bear pretending to be a dolphin.