Iran fired missiles at Dubai last weekend. British citizens made up of tourists, workers, and families spent nights sheltering in hotel basements, listening to interceptions overhead, unable to get a flight home. Around 300,000 UK nationals are registered across the Gulf states and the government is scrambling to work out how to get people back.

The conversation on UK social media? It was largely about whether those people pay taxes and deserve to be brought home or not.

I grew up in the UK, I now live in Canada and pay tax here. I’ve been watching this unfold with a familiar kind of exhaustion.

The tax argument

It doesn’t hold up. The UK and UAE have had a formal double taxation agreement since 2016. Both governments signed it. Not paying UK income tax while living in the UAE isn’t dodging anything, it’s literally what the agreement is designed to produce. The same goes for Canada, Australia, most places British people actually move to. HMRC knows you left. You filed the forms. The system worked as intended.

That’s almost beside the point. The tax thing is just the reason that got reached for, but the feeling came first.

Dubai isn’t even a country

Most people in this conversation keep saying Dubai like it’s a country. It’s not. The UAE is a country. People live all over it in places like Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, all over. But Dubai is the word being used because Dubai is where the influencers are in the British imagination.

The actual 300,000 people stranded aren’t mostly influencers. They’re just people who moved somewhere and built a life.

Dubai is shorthand for a type of person the British public has decided to be annoyed at. That’s doing a lot of work in this conversation.

Words doing work

Every headline calls them expats. British expats in Dubai. Stranded expats.

A British person moves to Dubai for work and a better life, expat. A Zimbabwean person moves to the UK for work and a better life, immigrant. Same decision, completely different word, and the word does a lot before any argument is even made. A Nigerian doctor in London is an immigrant. A British accountant in Lagos is an expat. It has almost nothing to do with what you do and almost everything to do with where you’re from.

If the headlines said “300,000 British immigrants stranded in Gulf states” which is accurate, I think the reaction would have looked different.

Where the anger actually goes

The UK is genuinely miserable right now. Wages stagnant, housing unaffordable, cost of living is brutal. People are struggling and angry and that’s understandable.

But the anger goes sideways. Not up at the systems and decisions that caused it, rather sideways at whoever seems to have found a way out. Benefits claimants, asylum seekers, people who moved to Dubai. Anyone who appears to be getting something without suffering for it the right way.

A lot of the people who left for the UAE are working class people who just did the maths. UK wages, UK housing, UK prospects, and then looked at what they could earn somewhere else and made a decision. That’s it. But the cultural message is that you’re not supposed to do that. You stay, you struggle alongside everyone else, and if you leave, you’ve forfeited something.

Follow that logic and see where it ends up. Can you get a doctor’s appointment if you’re unemployed, because you’re not currently paying tax? Can you claim housing benefit if you took a year out? The principle is never actually applied consistently because nobody really believes it as a principle. It only gets applied to people they’ve already decided to resent.

Where this actually comes from

There’s something deep in British culture and it’s older than Thatcher, though she made it worse. Brits are deeply uncomfortable with people getting above their station. Aspiration is tolerated but visible escape is resented. You can work hard, but if you actually get out too obviously, something curdles and people lose their minds.

Then austerity spent a decade telling everyone that resources are finite, that public money is scarce, that someone else getting help means you personally lose out. That’s not true but it’s what people were told, and it stuck.

A generation built their identity around endurance. Hard work was moral. So when the next generation says I don’t want that, I want to live differently, there’s a better way, it lands as an insult. Like you’re saying their suffering was optional.

The result is people who are genuinely being ground down by bad policy, bad wages, bad housing. They end up blaming each other instead of the people actually responsible. Keeping everyone else trapped to make the suffering feel like it meant something.

You can see it in UBI debates too. The argument always ends up at the millionaire getting £1000 a month, or the person who doesn’t work getting it “for free” as if that’s the reason the whole idea is impossible. The point is that everyone gets it, the single parent, the person between jobs, unconditionally, without having to prove they deserve it first. That’s what people can’t stand. The idea that someone might get something without earning it through hardship.

It’s collective self-harm dressed up as fiscal responsibility. Keep everyone poor to make sure nobody gets anything undeserved.

It’s not a left or right thing

The right has spent years attacking asylum seekers for draining UK taxpayers, people coming in who haven’t contributed. Now the left is saying people who left to make more money somewhere else don’t deserve help, people going out who stopped contributing. The logic is identical. The target just changed.

Both sides have drawn a circle around who counts. Neither seems to notice they’re running the same argument.

Nobody said this about Ukraine

When British nationals needed help getting out in 2022, the solidarity was just there automatically. Nobody checked whether they’d been paying UK income tax from Kyiv. People moved to Ukraine for all sorts of reasons like work, relationships, a life, and nobody interrogated the decision or made it about tax. But people have a pretty fixed idea of why someone would move to Dubai, and that idea rightly or wrongly is doing a lot of the moral work here.

Nobody says it about Monaco either… zero income tax, playground of the ultra wealthy. Nobody says it about the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, also zero income tax, also a formal tax agreement with the UK. Those conversations don’t come up. It’s specifically Dubai. Make of that what you will.

The cost argument

People’s lives in the UAE aren’t affecting anyone back in the UK. Nobody in Birmingham is worse off financially because a British nurse moved to Abu Dhabi and pays no income tax. The cost of evacuation flights is real but it’s a rounding error compared to what the UK government has spent in money, in arms, in diplomatic cover supporting the military action that destabilised the region in the first place.

The UK has been involved in Iranian affairs for decades. It’s been funding and supporting the very conflict that put these people in danger. The conversation about who deserves a flight home is happening in almost complete ignorance of that context.

The passport is a promise

The people stranded haven’t renounced their citizenship. They have British passports. That’s supposed to mean something in terms of consular protection when you’re in trouble abroad, regardless of where you chose to live or what tax bracket you’re in.

There’s this idea running through all of it that working class people should stay put, and if they’re lucky enough to get out, they shouldn’t expect anything if things go wrong. That if you improved your life in a way other people couldn’t or didn’t, you’ve opted out of the social contract.

We could be collectively working toward a world where people don’t have to suffer just to justify their existence. Instead we’re arguing about keeping ourselves trapped and making sure everyone else stays trapped too.

That’s just a mean way to organise a society.