To think the British people who went out to Dubai to profit from slave labour by "influencing" (i.e. manipulating) made their beds and now should lie cosily in them

[Mightneedencouraged]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/01/uk-citizens-detained-uae-frustrated-government-intervention-iran-conflict

The brass neck of these family members complaining when the boot is finally on the other authoritarian foot

quote : “The response from the authorities appears wholly disproportionate given the nature of the allegations.”

This type of attitude sums up the misunderstanding about how policing / the government operate in the UAE. On the one hand people will tell you much safer it is in Dubai and on the other hand how over the top the authorities are in relation to some matter that is perceived as trivial or less serious. You can’t have it both ways. You operate within their rules or you find out directly.

( I’ve trained police from the UAE so I have some experience of their mind set and quite frankly they would make me feel the opposite of safe )

Yup. I admit I was completely wrong and rushed in without reading the whole thing. They should have just followed the law.

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, albeit some time ago now, I have zero sympathy for anyone flouting their laws. We may not agree with them, but it’s a given that if you choose to live there, you keep your nose very clean - if you’ve got any sense.

As for anyone calling themselves an ‘influencer’, I had better make no comment!

And what's more, this is still very much an ongoing conflict. The UAE government, for good or for ill, are very invested in showing it's still business as usual. They really don't want people with a platform to have any opportunity to say otherwise while this is still going on, which they will do if they're released and have internet access again. I'm not saying any of this is a good thing, but it's pretty obvious why they're doing it.

I don’t accept that people who do “menial jobs” live off benefits anyway.

Separately, I think “influencing” is a vacuous and often unpleasant occupation. It often is manipulative, too.

Agreed. It’s ‘safe’ in terms of little petty crime, because the people who might commit it are under guard in labour camps in the desert when not working. It’s not ‘safe’ if you criticise Sheikh Mohammed (and that also holds true if you’re his wife or daughters), contravene censorship laws, get into debt, are a housemaid or labourer owed months of back pay, are gay, or fall foul of an Emirati. Don’t ever fall foul of an Emirati. (See the Sheikh Issa show trial in neighbouring Abu Dhabi for a particularly egregious example of this.)

Can you say more about the attitudes you encountered when police training, @Divebar2021?

And when will you be leaving the UK if you genuinely think we’re still profiting off the transatlantic slave trade?

Well we're not getting bombed...so there's that...

This is pretty OTT.Most of us live fairly lovely lives on our taxes thanks. I live in East London and I get free travel and a doctor's appointment when I need one. I haven't been stabbed yet.

Britain is not broken that's a fixation of the Daily Mail/Garage.
Yes the UK has issues but they did not spring up in the last two years.
Britain has had a lovely affair with drugs for decades
Aye the potholes are a pita shouldn't have been allowed to get that bad.
As you say not getting bombed is a big +

Farage..not garage

This. It's like when people have been given heavy sentences for drug smuggling in various countries. The UK cannot control the laws of other countries, we have to take responsibility for researching and complying with laws when we travel.

I'm slightly puzzled by the law - sharing information that could compromise national security- being described as draconian in the article. It may be being applied in draconian ways but I'd be shocked if we didn't have something similar and I assume we'd use it if we were being bombed and people posted things that undermined the government effort.

Agreed. The people who went there just to escape UK taxes and willingly turned a blind eye to the rampant human right issues and lack of freedom of expression only have themselves to blame.

@TheNorns

The UAE went through a process of buying in a lot of training from international forces so they had one country training one thing and another training another subject. The Met trained quite a few subjects either in Dubai or in London. I trained them in London for 2 weeks - my course involved training around sexual offences and child abuse. It was only the male officers who came as the women ( they told me they had some) weren’t allowed to travel. Their structure is like the military not our policing structures. The “ major” sat in the middle and they are deferred to him although they had big angry debates that the interpreter wouldn’t translate.

They wanted the exact course that our officers received but their cultural background and attitudes made it extremely difficult. It would have been better to discuss simple abuse scenarios - a simple physical assault rather than child sexual exploitation or grooming which is what I had to do. They pretty much blamed the child in the scenarios or the mother. They would ask why we couldn’t lock them up in a detention centre ( the child victim ). If a woman was divorced then there would be no further investigation- she was the problem. They have far more extensive powers to detain, arrest and use force than we have in the U.K. For example they can take intimate samples by force. There was one officer I felt who “ got it “ but the rest gave me no sense that they felt any different than when they arrived. If there had been a pass / fail they wouldn’t have passed.

Move to a country. Of your own free will.
Obey their laws.

It's really that simple.

Fuck all sympathy here.

Thanks, @Divebar2021 — that’s very interesting, and fits with my own experiences when living in Dubai/Abu Dhabi. One appalling case you’ve just made me remember was a US woman who’d married and later divorced an Emirati man. The first time he’d returned their young daughter after a court-ordained visit, the mother discovered that he’d taken the child to have FGM done in those couple of hours(it’s legal at private clinics, and fairly widely practiced). You can imagine how inadequate the police response was.

One question — do you know what nationalities the police you trained were? I’m imagining the major was Emirati, but not the ordinary cops?

I see no reason why our government should involve themselves in the legal proceedings of another state.

These people chose to move there (for the “freedom and safety”) and then broke the law and are now subject to punishment as a result.

They knew the score when they moved - if they didn’t that is on them.

There are plenty of people living and working in Dubai that are enabling wealth generation in the UK. Don’t be naive that it’s all about not paying taxes to the UK. No one pays taxes to the UK if they are resident elsewhere. All this rhetoric is because Dubai doesn’t levy income tax so frankly amounts to jealousy. Cost of living in Dubai is high though as you have to pay privately for those things provided by the state here - it’s just a different model. Same if you go and live anywhere else abroad - and we benefit from the tax paid by those that live in the UK but are from abroad - they usually don’t pay double tax to their home country too. Plenty of international law firms are in Dubai - they aren’t just servicing the Emirates - most high level investment is cross border these days and the UK will certainly be benefitting from that.

That's all very nice dear.

Still doesn't exempt people living in a country from obeying their laws.

Unless you feel immigrants should have different laws ?

@TheNorns

I don’t know sorry - I can tell you they liked a drink and they liked the casino. They would arrive in the morning with their mirrored sunglasses on with their hangovers. It just so happened that all the trainers and guest speakers I used for that course were women - the doctors and forensic experts etc that came in. They were pretty unimpressed 😏

Pretty crime is low because there's absolutely zero tolerance and there's lots of surveillance.

Then don't criticise the Sheikh, follow their laws repay loans. UAE government have instituted the Wage Protection System (WPS) to make sure people are paid on time. You can be gay, just don't act on it.

There’s no one to do the petty crime.

Who typically commits petty crime in the UK? Ask yourself why that cohort doesn’t exist in Dubai.

It's the fact many of them moved there partly for the tax benefits. If they want assistance from the British gov they can pay for it as far as I am concerned.

Many of us pay for our own transport. Guess we're paying for yours as well.

I watched a video in London where a 17 year old was mugged at knifepoint on a bus.

I think the government should do whatever we normally do in these circumstances of Brits abroad who have got in trouble for whatever reason.
I also think that as a country we should do a lot more to stop turning a blind eye to slave-type labour and ensure that products imported into this country are made by workers treated properly with decent health and safety provisions. It would make most products more expensive but surely none of us want to benefit from people essentially working in Victorian conditions.

There aren't actually that many of these very rich, very authoritarian countries in the world. The idea that there's loads of Brits in similar situations in other countries and the haters have just randomly decided to single out the UAE for no reason doesn't really stack up.