All of my friends are leaving the UK because ‘nothing works here any more’

It’s not just millionaires fleeing – middle-class families have been priced out of this country

Have you heard of a business called Henley & Partners? I hadn’t until a few days ago. It’s a “migration consultancy”, according to its website, but I don’t think they worry much about small boats crossing the Channel. Instead, they help millionaires and billionaires work out where they want to move when the tax regime becomes too onerous at home. “Having an alternative citizenship or residency is the best insurance policy,” croons its website. Which is presumably what the human traffickers say, too.
Let’s not get bogged down in grubby detail. The reason I came across the firm is because they’ve declared that 5,300 millionaires will leave the UK before the year is out. We’ve already lost 4,200 this year, apparently (where have they gone? They can’t all be down the back of the sofa), but another flotilla will glide away over the next few months after the forthcoming budget bites.
It’s not just millionaires fleeing, I mused, reading this news. It’s a good number of my pals, and I promise they’re not all rich. The majority are privately educated professionals, admittedly, but we’re really not talking Mayfair-dwelling, Chablis-swilling, Bentley-driving sorts. They’re in their 30s and 40s, largely married with young children, who have decided to leave various unglamorous pockets of London – Tooting, Acton and Brixton among them – and move abroad because, as one recently put it, “nothing works here anymore”. They’re moving, precisely because they’re not millionaires and the costs of mortgages and childcare have become too much.
Two separate friends and their families have just landed in Dubai for the start of the school year. Another is talking seriously about Abu Dhabi. Another still is about to head to Singapore. At a barbecue a couple of weeks ago, yet another friend revealed that she and her husband are about to go to Tanzania for a few days, to look at houses and schools in Dar es Salaam with a view of moving there shortly afterwards. In November, I’m going to visit a university friend who’s moved to Palm Beach, partly because she and her husband (both British) live five minutes from Mar-a-Lago and I fancy being there for the American election, but also because she seems to be living a wonderfully sunny life – actually and metaphorically. And it comes to something, doesn’t it, if living in America, a golf ball’s toss from Trump, is preferable to being here?
Moving abroad has been discussed wistfully among my gang in recent years, but for many, it felt like a pipe dream, something they’d probably never get around to. Why go through the administrative and very real hassle of upping a family and abandoning the UK, and grandparents and friends, for a place some have only visited once before? But in the past few months, there’s been a wind change and now a staggering number of peers seem to be doing it. I’ve never known so many people to be going. Not forever, they say vaguely, “just a few years”. But who knows?
I hopped on a video call with one this week to inspect his shiny new Dubai house, and I could already see evidence of a Gulf tan. His four-year-old has just started school with mostly other British children, where they’re also taught Arabic. Last weekend, he and his wife, plus a handful of other recent arrivals from the UK, gathered for lunch at a beach club (“although it was a bit too hot”). He and his wife now pay zero income tax and it costs him £30 to fill up his car. Plenty of people are snotty about Dubai but, given the gloom here, there doesn’t seem to be much hesitation about the place right now.
Having mulled over living abroad for some years, Tom says it was the “perfect storm” of unmanageable costs in Britain – chiefly housing and childcare – that provoked them in the end. Dubai is hardly cheap and it’s become wildly more expensive in the past few years because a huge number of Russians have fled there, but salaries generally take this into consideration. And if you’re not paying any income tax then, guess what, there’s a bit more to go around.
“Washing powder. You wouldn’t believe how expensive washing powder is,” a former expat counselled me in 2008, shortly before I moved to Abu Dhabi. The UK was riding through the Credit Crunch so the country felt similarly gloomy, and I was 23 and after an adventure. I was offered a job on a newspaper, I went, and they remain two of the most memorable and interesting years of my life. She was right. Washing powder was expensive, as was rent, and any form of fresh produce because it was mostly imported, eating out and drinking (we did drink, mostly in hotels, and we drank a good deal).
Owning a car and taxis were, on the other hand, suddenly very affordable compared to home, and I felt like a millionaire, hailing a cab simply to go out to dinner. Travelling wasn’t too expensive either because Dubai has a budget airline, so friends and I would go to Kerala or Muscat for the weekend, or Nepal. Most unforgettable of all, to a rural part of Azerbaijan, where we ate unidentifiable meat (possibly goat) and boiled sweets for the entire trip. That was proper adventuring.
I still tell anyone who’s thinking of moving abroad to do it. Sure, the politics of the Gulf are controversial, but if you’re going to restrict yourself to only living in countries that are squeaky clean, well, where does that put you? On the moon, at this rate, and I reckon the vegetables would be quite expensive there, too. My only worry, selfishly, is whether there’ll be anyone left before long. That old acronym, “FILTH”, is still bandied around when people announce they’re moving east: failed in London, try Hong Kong. But it’s not that those moving abroad have failed in the UK, these days; rather that the UK has failed them…
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