Forget football, moaning about Britain is our real national sport. From the weather to the potholes, and the politicians to the licence fee, we love a good grumble.
But there’s a difference between that and actually walking out the door. Lately, the smug goodbyes have followed the same script: Sell the business, board the flight, pose by an infinity pool with a caption about ‘lifestyle’ and ‘opportunity’, often topless with edited sunsets. Nearly 6,000 high-growth British business owners, ‘aspirational’ Brits and countless… ‘influencers’... (shudder) have upped and left the country since 2024, most of them headed for Dubai. The reason is not lifestyle. It’s tax.
The non-dom regime is gone, capital gains rules are stricter, and inheritance tax harsher. Dubai offered zero income tax and a golden visa. Simple economics. Then the missiles started falling, and suddenly the simple economics seemed less simple. You’ll remember the videos. Shrapnel landing on balconies, drone debris in car parks, the same people who spent years mocking ‘broken Britain’ from a rooftop bar suddenly filming the sky with shaky hands.
One person I followed on Instagram (past tense intended) talked of how scary it was to be awoken in the night to find his 67-storey hotel shaking. And just like that, paying tax in a boring, stable country stops feeling like such a raw deal. It turns out that independent courts that answer to nobody’s whim, a police force that isn’t preparing for war, and a health service that doesn’t shut when the airspace does, are worth something after all.