Populist right and the image of Dubai

*Dubai presents the hard-right vision of utopia: a place stripped of

workers’ protections or the right to protest, a place of pure

environmental dereliction, a place where everyone drives everywhere, a

place where the queer and the gender-fluid are told from birth that

they simply do not exist, a place where citizenship is defined along

narrow ethnic lines and everyone else is there on sufferance, where the

super-rich and well-connected can simply do and consume as they please.

A place where the poor are simply cleared out of sight.

But of course, the poor do exist in Dubai. They live in often squalid

camps on the baking peripheries of  the city, working long hours for low

wages with no protections, indentured if not always by law then by

circumstance. Migrant workers [110]form almost 90% of the UAE

population, most from south Asia or the Philippines. And unlike the

small and gilded class of native Emiratis who enjoy free healthcare and

a generous welfare state, they must toil unquestioningly in a system

engineered to   embed their subservience.*