I have friends in Dubai right now working under missile strikes.
Not tax dodgers. Not expats living it up. Friends. People I lived alongside for three years, built things with, drank with. Right now they are being constantly awoken by incoming missile warnings and watching airspace close.
The UK’s response, the media, the commentariat, the politicians queuing up for their moment on morning television, is essentially: “fuck them. They chose to leave. Let them sort it out.”
Susanna Reid asked on breakfast TV whether Brits who moved to Dubai to avoid UK tax should fund their own evacuation (Nobody told her HM Gov repatriation flights are charged, at above market rate too). Ed Davey piled in. The Telegraph. The whole chorus. Tax dodgers. Deserters. Not our problem.
Let me tell you about the repatriation flight that nobody in Dubai even fucking asked for.
HM Government told British nationals to drive four hours across the Gulf, during an active war, to catch a flight out of Oman.
The flight eventually departed, several hours late, because the pilot had exceeded his legal flying hours.
An airport running at full capacity throughout the entire conflict, zero closures, and the British government still couldn’t get a plane away on time.
They then sent everyone a bill. More than a commercial ticket would have cost.
A government that cannot organise a piss up in a brewery sent people in a war zone on a four hour drive and charged them over the odds for the privilege of being let down.
And the received wisdom is that Deano should be taxed harder to fund more of this.
Deano didn’t take the flight. Deano isn’t a fucking mug.
Deano’s still in Dubai. Living his best life.
Dubai has a very specific type of person in it and I say this having lived there for three years.
Recruiters, mostly, or Real estate agents. Men who’ve turned a modest living into a personality and need you to know about it before the first round arrives.
The full wideboy diaspora, relocated somewhere the blazer works year round and the brunch bleeds into dinner and somehow back into brunch again.
They exist. Significant numbers of them. Some are genuinely insufferable.
The lanyard class have decided the entire population of British expats in the Gulf can be reduced to the wideboy caricature.
Not the Oxbridge intake, obviously. But their ideological cousins. The ones with a 2:2 in media studies from a former polytechnic who found their way into a BBC producer role or a think-tank sinecure and have been explaining the world to the rest of us ever since.
The ones with the righteous breakfast television faces and the very strong opinions about what people who left should have done instead.
There’s a reason for the anger and Basil Fawlty understood it before any of them did. The aspirational middle class man who was told he was destined for something. The attitude of a colonial administrator. The bearing of a brigadier. The reality of a leaky hotel in Torquay arguing with a Spanish waiter. The rage isn’t madness. It’s the specific fury of a man who was promised an empire and got a career in regional broadcasting instead. Who was told he was clever and ended up writing policy papers nobody reads. Who was supposed to matter and ended up explaining on breakfast television why the people who actually went and built something should have stayed home and paid more tax instead.
Deano throws all of it into relief.
Nobody promised Deano the brigadier’s job. He had no greatness to mourn, no empire-shaped hole to fill. So he just went and built something without the psychological baggage of a broken promise weighing on every decision he made.
That’s the thing that really boils their piss.
Basil resented Manuel not because Manuel was beneath him but because Manuel was content.
Deano isn’t carrying the weight of a destiny that never arrived. And his Range Rover is proof that the promise was always the problem.
I left school at 17. No degree. No approved path.
My demographic has spent thirty years as the political class’s favourite punching bag. White, working class, male. Invisible when convenient. Scapegoat when useful. The sneering is so embedded it passes for received wisdom now. The sycophantic fawning over “Adolescence” barely hiding another way to twist the knife and brand an entire demographic as the problem.
My grandfather served. My uncle served. My father served. My mother served. My sister still does. I put on a uniform and served the Crown myself, voluntarily, knowing what it asked of you and putting ourselves in harms way.
Three generations of my family. In service of this country.
And I’m the traitor?
Some might argue Britain was at its best when it celebrated the ones who went. Not the paper pushers in Whitehall.
The working class men who couldn’t stand the constraints and had nothing to lose by leaving, who shipped out to Singapore, to Hong Kong, to Aden, to every corner of the map the pink touched.
Who built trading posts and ran railways and made fortunes and sent money home. Who expanded the known world not because they were told to but because staying felt like slow suffocation.
They weren’t the scum of the earth. They were the salt of it.
These are the same lads who were below deck loading the cannons at Trafalgar.
Who went over the top at the Somme.
Who did what was asked of them and more, without complaint, without recognition, and without a penny more than they were owed.
Britain of then did not look at those men and ask whether they were paying their fair share. It pointed them at the horizon and called them the backbone of the nation. And the country was better for it.
Now it calls their grandchildren tax dodgers for moving to Dubai.
The instinct didn’t go anywhere.
That restlessness, that refusal to accept the ceiling you were handed, that need to go and build something, it’s still there. It didn’t die with the Empire. It just ran out of state to serve under.
Whitehall lost its bottle. The map stopped expanding.
The institutions that once pointed those men at the horizon turned inward, shrank, and started explaining why nothing was possible anymore.
So they went anyway.
Alone. Without the Crown behind them, without the flag in front of them, without anyone’s blessing or anyone’s permission.
The same human characteristic that loaded the cannons and crossed the wire, redirected. Into trading desks in Dubai. Into crypto wallets. Into businesses built in cities that actually want them.
Britain didn’t create Deano. It failed to contain him.
Compare that to a government that in 2026 could not muster a single warship to defend its own military bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia.
Not one ship. The contrast could not be more stark if you’d designed it as an illustration.
The same restless energy found a new outlet.
For me, Bitcoin rewarded it. Not the credentialled class, not the people whose job it was to understand emerging financial systems.
The FT columnists who called it rat poison. The BBC economics correspondents explaining patiently why it was backed by nothing. The think-tank people with their 2:2s and their carefully hedged takes and their very serious concerns.
They missed it. Completely. Expensively.
The kid who left school at 17 and didn’t trust institutions, who had a different relationship with risk because he’d never had a safety net, got it right. The same instinct that sent working class men to the far corners looked at a system designed to exclude them and went around it instead.
Not through their system. Around it. I’m aware of the fortunate position I now find myself in.
That’s not supposed to happen. That’s what they can’t metabolise. The wrong people got rich.
So here is what actually boils their piss.
It’s not the tax. It’s not the sun. It’s not even Deano with the Range Rover and the salary.
When they sit at home on a Tuesday afternoon in November. Pewter sky sitting two inches above the rooftops. The same four walls of a house that’s smaller than it was when you moved in because everything costs more now and the rooms seem to have shrunk with it.
The boiler that needs replacing sitting quietly at the back of every financial decision you make. The commute home already mentally rehearsed, forty minutes each way of someone else’s music bleeding through the seat in front.
Back to scroll through your phone over a dinner that’s fine, perfectly fine, and watch something on television you’re not really watching, and be in bed by ten because tomorrow is the same and there’s no particular reason to stay up for it.
And somewhere in that scroll, Deano.
Tan. Grinning. Rooftop something. Tagged somewhere warm.
We went to the same schools. Grew up in the same towns. Watched the same TV and read the same papers and started from the same place.
And if he made it out, if the kid they wrote off with no degree and no approved path found a way, then the only question is why they didn’t.
They already know the answer.
That’s what they can’t stand.
The distance between that life and Deano’s isn’t talent.
It isn’t class.
It isn’t luck.
It’s a decision. One you could have made. One you didn’t make.
And every grey Tuesday it sits there quietly at the back of everything, like the boiler.
Easier to call him a traitor.
He’s you. But he tried.
He had the wherewithal to make bold decisions, throw caution to the wind, and plot his own path in life.
He’s the person you could have been. But you’re not.
And you fucking know it.
Deep down. You know it.