DUBAI Opinion polls ahead of Thursday’s UK general election may not suggest a clear majority for a single party, but many Britons in the UAE want incumbent David Cameron of the Conservative Party to carry on for another term.

“Not Ed Miliband. Britain has been one of the best performing G7 economies of the last couple of years. I believe the Conservatives under Cameron have done a good job. I would prefer a majority, but a coalition seems likely. Which is a shame because government needs decisiveness,” says Damian English, 43, a finance professional from London who is mailing his poll papers to the UK by post from Dubai this week.

English is among the first batch of British expatriates here in the UAE who – for the first time ever – registered online to vote. According to sources, an estimated 3,000 expatriates have listed as eligible voters for this Thursday’s general election, touted as one of the tightest for decades.

“Cameron’s job is not finished yet and if the Labour party gets in, backed by the Scottish Nationalist Party, then it will be a disaster,” says Londoner Mark Hinds, 52, a Sales Director for an MNC in Dubai.

“Besides Ed Milliband has proved himself to be a profligate spender in the past and he would do exactly the same thing again,” adds Hinds who’s lived in the UAE for two decades and voted in every election during his stay in the country.

In Britain’s only second hung parliament in 2010, Cameron formed the UK’s first coalition government since the Churchill war ministry of the Second World War comprising members of both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. Many Britons here want Cameron to have an outright victory this time.

Cameron can

Tom Galloway, 46, a marketing specialist from Lancaster who has lived in Dubai since 2007, says: “If you consider the nature of the current Labour party, they are extreme left-wing. Lots of people say they can’t see the difference between the Conservative and the Labour parties today, but to me the left-wing Labour Party are a party who built social dependency by trapping people into welfare, and making it more worthwhile not to work and take handouts from the government instead. This is one of the reasons why, as a consequence, the UK today is in such a bad shape after the last election.”

Galloway, who voted in the last election, continues: “The Conservative Party by comparison are a party of aspiration where they support the growth of business, encouraging business to expand and, therefore, create more jobs and this has been proven with the roughly two million jobs being created in the last government. They also reduced taxation on individuals which gives greater incentive to have a job and to work.”

However, it’s no all-for-Cameron here in the UAE. Brian Graveney, 38, a relative newcomer to Dubai having moved base from Manchester last year, says he is not a big fan of David Cameron. “Although he has put the economy back into a favourable position there are a lot of things that I don’t like about him and if I could choose a Conservative leader it would not be him.”

A majority of the estimated 120,000 plus Britons in the UAE aren’t voting and for many of them it will be business as usual here after the elections on Thursday. Some say they are forced to watch the key battle as ‘outsiders’ for having stayed outside for long.

“Personally, I’m standing on the shoreline, watching that voting boat sail away without a second glance. I didn’t bother trying to register: for the first time since I turned 18 this is a general election in which I, having lived overseas for more than 15 years, am not eligible to vote,” says Dubai-based novelist Annabel Kantaria, Expat blogger for the Telegraph Media Group, in her blog.

“The fact that I live in the UAE means I’m completely disenfranchised; a voiceless will-o’- the-wisp on the global political stage,” she told XPRESS, explaining why she feels so ‘peculiar’ having studied government and politics at school and learned ‘the importance of making one’s voice heard’.

(Some names have been changed on request to protect identities)

 

YOUSPEAK: Whom do you support: Cameron or Miliband?