Ignorance rules among the UK critics of Dubai

Dubai is presently enduring the ‘capitulation and bottom phase’ of the emerging market business cycle, as brilliantly described by Dr Marc Faber in his book ‘Tomorrow’s Gold’.

This is the nasty period that marks the nemesis of the business cycle which inevitably – should anybody get so gloomy as to forget – turns up, and often bounces into a brighter and stronger future having shed its weakest players and knocked uneconomic projects on the head.

Negative press

Of the media Dr Faber notes the following symptoms are evident in this period: ‘Headlines turn very negative. The international press depicts countries in phase six very negatively.’

You can say that again. It is saddening to see the former editor of The Times and a distinguished architectural writer, Simon Jenkins plunging this process to new depths in his latest piece in The Guardian, that bastion of the liberal British middle class – a section of the global population also undergoing a touch of phase six these days.

But what is so apparent from all these articles, and even Mr Jenkins is no different, is the appallingly shallow research that the journalists have undertaken before given vent to their underlying prejudices. Indeed, you could imagine Mr. Jenkins taking a junior journalist to task for similar errors of omission.

Factual errors

He makes serious errors of historical compression. He gets the sheikh’s name wrong. He misspells Doha. He compares Dubai to Detroit while forgetting that the emirate is a part of the UAE federation, arguably the richest country in the world and a net creditor nation.

But this is the most unforgiveable and deeply offensive paragraph about his vision of the future:

‘Thousands of residential properties, if occupied at all, will be squatted by a migratory poor, like the hotel towers of the Spanish littoral or Corbusier’s blockhouses of Chandigarh in India. Refugees will colonise the camps where Indian workers have lived as they built Dubai. Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards.’

This just shows zero knowledge of the social structure of the UAE from which guest workers on residency visas will be sent home if they lose their jobs. It is also astonishingly offensive to the wealthy citizens and residents of the UAE to even imagine that such a situation could be allowed to occur.

It is the fantasy of a commentator of fading talent who makes up his own facts and by his own admission hardly knows Dubai.