Living in the Future: Why London Will be Like the Gulf Very Soon

Last week I played host, albeit for only an hour or so, to two visitors from London coming to Kuwait City. The differences between these two conurbations are clear enough for anybody to see, and feel, at a glance; but I want to use this slot to put out a warning to people living in my newfound hometown on the Thames, and tell them how they're quickly catching up with the energy-consuming, waistline-expanding, concrete building-dwelling denizens of the Gulf.

Wimbledon Village, despite its growing population of moneyed Arabs, is probably one of the last parts of London one would expect to resemble Kuwait or the Gulf in general. But an idyllic stroll around the very English common on a Sunday is a good place to witness the worrying convergence between the Gulf and the south of England. It's not uncommon, in 2008, to watch as English couples leave their children of imported maids and nannies from East Asia, typically, as is the case in the Gulf, from the Phillipines. The fact that these families, who demonstrably have ample time which they could spend their children are hiring foreign help will not be without its consequences. As at least one Kuwaiti sociologist points out, leaving your children with a underpaid foreign help is bad enough for the underpaid foreign help--but it also means, as the nannies concerned are likely to only speak pidgin English, that the children are growing up with a sever linguistic and social handicap. With their first experiences of many Asian nationalities coming through the person of domestic help, children in this part of the world quickly pick up a form of racism which is obstinate in its presence. The rapid economic rise in places like India has been greeted with something approaching disbelief here--if they were doing so well, how is it they have to send legions of labourers here?

Like the Gulf, and completely unlike India, the UK is also going about it non-industrially; there is almost a religious belief in the media and "creative" industries being able to drive the economy as a whole. If thousands of Islington-dwelling arty farty film types can make enough money to buy DVD players for £15, then why worry about trying to put people in back-breaking jobs where they physically have to make the machines? This ability to live off the cream of the land without having to do any of the milking has earned the Gulf states the admiration of even former heads of the WTO . Surprisingly, nobody has considered the fact that having absolutely no manufacturing base whatsoever has meant that both the UK and the GCC have uncontrollable inflation problems--if all the goods available in a given market are produced and priced abroad, simply twiddling interest rates at Central Bank level will do no good for anybody. The ultimate result of all this is in fact making itself in the increasingly similar ways in which the UK and the Gulf are treating their workers: Witness suggestions that new immigrants to Britain should expect fewer economic advantages, later, a result of growing unease at the sheer numbers of foreigners contributing to the British economy. Like the Gulf states before, one of the first casualties will be syndicated labour within the British economy.

So I'm going to end this long-overdue blog post like so many others in the past, with little glue to hold the bits together, and just a nod to some things which have been bothering me.