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Okay, so, so first question I suppose is, is the attack on Dubai and HMRC false flag?

I mean, it kind of felt like that, didn't it?

Did you watch Ed Davies address?

I did.

To the comments.

Yeah.

I forget that Ed Davies, I have like a baby's object in permanence.

Like I forget that Ed Davies is a person unless he's right there in front of me.

And it was very distressing being like reminded of the Libdown leader when he gives this

ridiculous speech to the house, which is basically making a kind of blue sky snarky

point, which is, you know, if you've had the country for tax optimisation reasons, then

why should we pay to help fly you out?

And this is obviously the proposed flight that I think the government was trying to get

out the Gulf region, which didn't even take off the night it was supposed to be, because

we can't make anything work.

So, it was all the more reason you'd be a tax exile.

I think that that really summed up the kind of mindset of a sense section of the British

political class, which is quite middle-class, maybe damodly mobile.

Yes.

Doesn't have a lot of space blame come, but who make up for that by having a kind of sense

of propriety, like, devise everything that they would compare themselves against, which

is, you know, devise gush, it's tacky, it's not commuterion, whereas we, you know, we

work in the professions, we're upstanding, we care about our fellow man.

Of course, we will take, like, a, you know, the Somali people who need to enter the UK

for reasons unknown to us, either they've never paid tax money to us, but if you're

like my fellow countryman until 10 minutes ago, then, well, you make your choice.

You know, you walk out, say, we're not going to look after you.

Quite an incredible amount of relish at the idea of which systems being killed by a foreigner

gym.

It's really crazy.

And also from a lot of journalists this week, incredible number of op-eds.

But isn't that, like, the thesis of these people being, like, downedly mobile, you

know, of, like, resent-filled, because, like, journalists are the perfect example.

I can say there's being one.

They usually make that much money overeducated, but they have status, that's what they've

got.

If they actually wanted to make money, there would be property influences in Dubai.

They would be journalists of a different kind, you know, they'd be, like, pumping and dumping,

like, shit coins.

So I wasn't surprised seeing, like, you know, all the times, commerce, I think, the worst.

I think every single time economists came out and had their, like, you know, two minutes

hate for Dubai experts.

I think two journalists I saw who had good takes on Dubai.

No, several.

So there was, there was Maddie Grant at the spectator at the sound.

There was Duncan Robinson at the economist's sound.

And there was Janen Ganesh at the FT, who actually is sometimes very sound.

I mean, I love...

I do love to know.

Yeah.

He was right about Dubai.

Well, he's perfect, because I think he, I don't think he has any particular love, necessarily,

for people to buy it, but he hates journalists as a classroom, you know?

So like, on the basis of spite, he will often come to the correct opinion, although he has

written before about, like, what Dubai kind of stands for, you know, he does like the

city.

Because I feel he's probably more secure in himself.

He doesn't feel the need to punch down.

Maddie's peace was very good.

Duncan, of course, was good, but I think for everyone else, particularly those in, like,

the kind of mainstream middle-market publications, it was very spiteful.

It was incredibly so.

It was like, you know, this is maybe a bit extreme, but it's like the idea of very acid

in the face of your ex-girlfriend.

So she can't talk quite a lot about mainstream.

I'm quite a non-human.

So I was thinking that it was like, mate, hang on, before we get on to it, maybe we should...

There will be people listening who don't really know about the kind of cultural position

to buy in Britain, because I think Brits are overwhelmingly the best-represented national

personality in the elite class of Dubai.

Obviously Dubai has lots and lots of say Bangladesh, or your Filipino nationals as well.

But there aren't, for instance, very many Australians in Dubai.

I don't think there are very many Americans in Dubai.

It is mostly Brits.

The city therefore has a very distinctively British diaspora and has waitros and MNS and

all this kind of institutions.

I say this haven't been there in Gran total of two nights, so it's not like I know it

very well.

But when I texted you to ask if you wanted to talk about some of the pop-ups that you've

ever been to Dubai, you said, of course, I'm from Essex, which does kind of, I mean,

that is kind of the point.

And is exactly what's eliciting all of this spite from journalists and politicians?

I mean, the reason why I kind of made the dig about Essex is it's precisely the kind

of person that ends up going to Dubai.

So it's someone who is very ambitious and money-materators, who will otherwise be working

in the city, maybe not as like the most high status financial industries, but maybe like

insurance.

They make you good money.

There are also quite a lot of engineers and teachers in real estate, and trades as well.

You're like making actually a lot of money on those constructions, yeah, massive.

People who are basically contemptuous of tax and the idea that you've got to pay for

your fellow countrymen, like that's not the attitude.

And the reason why Dubai is so great for them is because they don't, they're not snobbish.

So the idea of like trending around the world where you can make loads of money to have

to pay tax, you've got these private schools that you can access, you know, it's actually

quite a fun culture, despite the fact that it's like Islamic regime, because you're with

people that are like, you, there's no taboo about going to Dubai.

And it's not just Dubai now, I mean, the Middle East more broadly and a lot of people are

going to Qatar, you know, I think there's as many Brits in every derby as Dubai pretty

much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think like Dubai was the first place that people started to go to, I know that people

started going really about two decades ago, maybe 15 years ago, people started making

a move on Mars.

And now the region is kind of considered to be desirable and it's become like a real thing.

Yeah.

And it's this, yeah, it's this slice of upwardly mobile, or would be made upwardly mobile

by Dubai, working class alone with a class people who do, yeah, elicit this incredible

amount of, I was thinking what the, I was wondering what the reaction would be this

week.

I would say New Zealand had had horrific earthquake and tsunami, which is not impossible

because New Zealand is close to a fault line.

And if for some reason, either British nationals or people of British descent needed help

from the British government in New Zealand, I don't think anybody would be saying, sir,

do you write for going to a dangerous place?

No, no, no.

Even though everyone knows that New Zealand is a risk of earthquakes, right?

It's not that it's a foreign country is the type of person they imagine goes there,

yeah, they hate.

And they've kind of constructed an idea and it's not entirely like off the mark, you know,

you do tend to understand when someone is from Dubai, they usually will tell you within

about 10 seconds if you haven't figured it out for the way they look.

But I was trying to think of like an example which would make sense in an American context.

And I could only think of a really small scale one, which is like the kind of San Francisco

crypto millilets who decide to become digital nomads or set up these like charter cities

abroad.

I think that's the equivalent.

Like if there was like some like an earthquake or some natural disaster or here in town

situation, I can imagine the same amount of kind of like ha ha that you got that you

deserve.

Different class though?

Different, slightly different class.

So they were the crypto, it's like there were zero barriers to entry for crypto.

So a lot of people made a lot of money and you know, if you're like a kind of professional

striver, you'd be like, why is this person rich in the meat on the basis that they were

like on a certain forum in 2014, more like a lease of this coin?

Yeah.

I know that like full-time investors and blah, blah, blah.

I think it's a similar type of character that's like easy for them to externalize that

kind of like shame and desire.

Except that there is no direct American counterpart to Dubai because Americans don't drive away

the sort of people who would otherwise go to Dubai.

Well, you go to a different state, right?

Exactly.

So it may be Austin, Miami or some of the, yeah, or Nashville or, you can imagine cities

but Americans wouldn't go offshore because they don't need to.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe going to, but it's not Dubai isn't like a tax haven, like going to Cayman's

or something because it's actually a center of industry as well as being low tax.

Yeah.

So it takes Singapore.

It's like it is like a big creative financial services industry from nothing.

Yeah.

On the basis of, I mean, it's a smart strategy, you attract the best people in the financial

services industry or the younger people in the financial services industry, he won't

quite that yet.

Very ambitious and don't wait around.

You pay them really good salaries.

You give them a fantastic lifestyle and eventually the job will come there naturally.

And you need to buy his, his main nice secret with the fact that it kind of wants to take

over from London in terms of being like our financial services hotspot.

Yeah.

And they're pretty well placed to do that for like various reasons, mostly because London

is like deliberately making itself much worse, which makes Dubai a lot more attractive.

But I mean, yeah, a lot of people going to Dubai, maybe they're working construction.

Yeah, they're not actually building houses themselves, at least not the British as part.

But they're also people who are like more high status, he make a lot of money.

He would have been very successful already in London and he want to make the jump for

reasons now that weren't the same as they would have been 20 years ago.

It's not just avoiding tax, it's that the standard of living is genuinely much higher

for them.

Yeah.

It's possible that a day of you were trying to be generous, was thinking not so much

of someone who goes out to work in construction management or as a real estate agent or whatever.

But someone who is a super wealthy non-domal celebrity or influencer or whoever who has already

made it and then goes to Dubai to avoid paying tax.

But my impression is that most people in Dubai are not in that position.

I mean, how could there be, there are a quarter of a million?

And even if they are, I mean, the kind of spiteful attitude.

Yeah.

I hope you get bombed.

You know, that's an extreme response.

It's giving like a piece of boyfriend, you know, like it's so spiteful and miserable.

Again, you look at America, America knows that it can kind of geese the people who make

a lot of money through taxation, but you don't want to actually push those people out.

It's not a good idea to push those people out and it's it's psychologically difficult

to accept that because those people are annoying because they're weird.

And they usually are obnoxious and tacky or whatever, but that's not how you make things

better for everyone else is basically attempting to hold your citizens emotionally hostage.

On the obnoxious point, my personal experience, and that admittedly, this doesn't extend

that far, is that very rich people that I've met tend to be actually extremely nice.

I kind of agree with that.

Yeah.

It's obviously the kind of the ogre image.

I think it's mostly, well, maybe you certainly need to have some distinctive personality traits

in order to be self-made and get to that level.

And those might include being ruthless or even psychopathic, but equally, it might just

mean that you're extremely industrious and really good at charming people.

Yeah.

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In which case, you're a very nice company and you know, you're probably nice to work

for.

It's totally true that the worst people in your life, particularly if you're working

in an industry like journalism, which is, you know, that's self kind of downedling mobile

and struggling, are the ones with the knives out who have to kind of ruthlessly play these

status games to maintain that own position.

You're completely right.

If you actually meet someone who's made it, they're usually lovely because they've made

it.

That's a few of them themselves.

They're usually quite self-starting.

They're usually quite engaging.

I would much rather be in a room with a crypto billionaire.

They would with a Davy.

A Davy probably is charming politicians to be fair, do you tend to be quite charming

in person?

Well, I do know.

I mean, with a crypto billionaire, I can ask him for money.

I probably think I'm a Davy.

It's such a big fan of your coin.

But yeah, I do know it's just, it's again, this feeling of regardless of how rich are

poor those people are.

If they were British citizens, not that long ago, they're still a cultural connection.

I mean, yeah.

People actually think, and this is, I suppose, another aspect of it, and you see it a lot

with Spanish expires as well, and there's old people you go, you know, move to Spain for

a nice retirement, which is they're not actually integrating into the countries that they go

to.

Maybe that will happen in time, but at least from what I've experienced with Dubai, they

are so English.

Yeah.

They have that English enclaves.

Dubai is quite diverse.

And so far as it's got like, it's by the deshi construction workers.

It has some kind of African elites as well, coming in, but also construction workers.

It has like rations on the run with the like slightly dodgy money, it has Eastern European

models, and then it has the English financial workers.

But these groups do not mix, you know, unless there's like a transaction, it's accidentally

in the airport.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They remain just as British.

You know, you can go out there to Dubai 15 years, come back to the UK.

You have not changed.

A seven to British schools as well, because they have satellites.

I do.

And that in fact, that's part of my Dubai experience during people I've met from Dubai.

I was remember being really shocked when I first met someone who'd been born and grown

up in Dubai.

Was a British distance still.

I was like, you just can't tell.

There's not an accent.

There's not like a way of dressing.

There's not any mannerism.

Not even the kind of international school accent.

No, you'll get a name.

Because there's like international schools actually would have children for around the

world.

These are just British schools.

Of course.

They're not really that many.

Yeah.

There's not even that like strange kind of American, but I can't quite put my finger

on what it actually is.

Yeah.

I like distinctly English about the people who are staying, but they don't change.

And that reminds me slightly of the British Empire, which is, you know, it's, it has been

a tradition that people would go out.

They would stay in like a region or go out and make their fortunes and then come back.

And, you know, they wouldn't really be that changed for their ideas of decor and would

be the same.

They wouldn't run the language unless they were a particular type of person.

They would have married an English person.

That is the kind of gift of Dubai.

I think if you feel the constraints of this island, you can go and make your money in

a way that we would have been able to do 150 years ago, that's now been completely closed

off from us.

Yeah.

There's a kind of part of me, an old romantic part of me that thinks that's a nice thing.

So one of the things that will often come up in discussions about Dubai and it's, so

I mean, there are, I guess there are three objections you're commenting here to buy.

One is that there is something inherently wrong with not wanting to pay tax and certainly

wanting to flee British tax obligations, although it's worth pointing out that obviously

if you emigrate anywhere else, if you emigrate to Australia, America, or whatever, you also

will be paying British tax, you'll be paying, or New Zealand as the, you know, the earthquake

example.

New Zealand has quite a significantly lower tax in Britain.

It's not a tax haven, but, you know, but Dubai obviously has 0% income tax, so it's

particularly, if you believe that you have a moral duty to pay lots and lots of tax,

then you are shirking your moral duty particularly, egregiously in Dubai.

The second objection is to general craftness and tackiness and being materialistic and

so on, which I think is very, very laden with class stuff, which we've spoken about.

And then the third objection is to do with Dubai human rights abuses, and this often comes

up in relation to people having domestic stuff.

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Who are...

It's so much more affordable to have domestic staff into buy than it is in Britain because

people will work for lower wages.

Although not massively lower, I think I read something about what it costs to employ a nanny in Dubai.

And it's less than and not massively less.

It's partly because everyone is paying less tax.

You have to pay your nanny less for her to have the same quality of life.

Part of what's going on there is true that people are often treated badly.

That sometimes happens to the elite professionals as well,

that they'll be out on their ass if they come into conflict with the wrong person in Dubai.

Or if they break the laws and are kind of unlucky and how they are treated.

But I also think, in this case back to the class thing,

I think there's a very strong middle-class Anglo-objection to employing domestic staff.

Full-stop, yeah.

And the idea of wanting to do that and going somewhere so that you can do that.

Have you read the book not in front of the servants?

No. It was quite popular at the time when it came out,

which is over 60 years ago now.

But it's quite niche nowadays.

It was actually written by an ex-delighted telegraph writer.

A lot of the women and men, but it's mostly women,

who are working as domestic staff at that point,

nearly all about to die because in Britain,

we don't really use domestic staff after the First World War,

outside of very, very, very small context.

And it's been under decline up until then.

And so what he did is he kind of gathered together these first hand accounts

of people who had been working as domestic staff.

Interesting.

And it paints a fascinating picture of just how much the country has changed

in actually quite a short period of time,

from having millions and millions of people employed as domestic workers

via from the age of 12.

In service.

In service, you know, sleeping in an attic,

not being able to leave the house without the permission of the mistress of the house.

The Dubai lifestyle.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's genuinely quite, I'm quite appalling cases of abuse as well.

Well, there's some positive accounts.

Of course, life is complicated,

but you're even, even to our sensibilities,

something that's obviously a behind,

people would have just gone, gone, gone, all men.

It is definitely true that the attitudes that we used to have a hundred years ago,

towards using domestic staff,

is completely changed.

People feel embarrassed about using a cleaner.

I know.

A well-played cleaner.

I mean, that's another newspaper discourse thing.

I think I remember the tennis police,

cut my answer, but she had a cleaner,

and everyone was, like, piling it on her.

It's like, really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, all this is she does.

Oh, of course she does.

She must.

Yeah, yeah.

She's like a working mother.

It would be so weird if she didn't.

Exactly.

I hate cleaning.

Half the reason I get home.

Ben in the morning is, I can afford a cleaner.

It's come in my tiny she-box flat,

and like, rip me off.

Like, you know, do a little bit of soothing again.

This came up during COVID.

Yeah.

Because I think you remember Owen Jones getting very,

Owen Jones lives in, like,

he still lives like a student,

so he lives in, like, a house share.

Because of our battles.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they, I think they have a cleaner,

which they kind of share,

between all of them that he said he objected to it.

And, anyway, there was a whole sort of drama about it.

People criticizing him for having a cleaner.

And he said, don't worry.

I paid her, you know, she's not gold furlough.

Like, I paid her the whole time during COVID.

And it was, it was, yeah, I mean,

a revealing of the fact that,

I don't really, it's not clear to me

why the British left hate employing people that much.

What is it about employing people to work in your home?

Which makes it terrible.

You've just listened to a clip from a new bonus episode

I recorded with the telegraphs Poppy Coburn

about the ongoing threat to Dubai,

and the city's very revealing role

in the British Cultural Imagination.

You can find the full episode by going to the home

of the Maiden Mother Nature Out podcast

at louiseperiod.substract.com,

even I find it a tongue twister.

I record bonus episodes like this every week,

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If you'd like to listen to those episodes,

as well as to the ad-free versions

of all of the other MM episodes,

you can sign up for a paid subscription,

which costs either $8 a month

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So if you would like to join their ranks,

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