BY STEWART SLATER

Of all the things I have been called which can be reprinted in a family website, the one which tickled me the most was when a headhunter leaned across the table and said, “Well, of course, Stewart. You’re an old Asia hand.” If part of me bristled slightly at the usage of the word “old”, a much greater portion was immediately transported to an imagined past where I was bombing down the roads of what was still called Malaya after a hard week of organising the natives on my rubber plantation, dreaming of a weekend of Singapore Slings and debauchery in the Long Bar at Raffles.

My interlocutor was right. Drop me in my birth city of Edinburgh and I’ll starve or be kicked to death in 24 hours, my English accent marking me out as the “Auld Enemy”. Put me in the back streets of Tokyo or Singapore and you’ll never see me again, even if news reports of an odd gaijin or ang mo may occasionally surface. Like many of my countrymen for the last two centuries, I have left my native land to seek my fortune and, like most of them, I have deeply enjoyed doing so.

If Tokyo has always been at the more expert end of the expat spectrum, the Little Red Dot is known throughout the continent as “playing Asia on easy mode”. Everyone speaks English, fish and chips appear on almost every menu and, if it all gets too much, there are as many bars modelled on English pubs as there are cells in your liver. While Tokyo only, nowadays, really attracts bankers and lawyers, everyone can find a home in Singapore.

And many do. The weather is good, the tax is low and most things are cheap. Lunch at a Michelin-starred hawker stall costs a couple of quid, a live-in maid will do anything (legal) you want six days a week for not much more than £200 a month. It does not take more than a few months of low-tax earning, cheap labour and Sundays around the pool at the club for the boundaries between the present and the colonial past to fade into nothingness.

But, as Adam Curtis would put it, this is a fantasy. A planter of the twenties could return home to Blighty and not notice much difference, save the weather. His clothes would still be made for him by a tailor, he would never do anything so ordinary as shopping and would doubtless have servants to take care of him. The modern expat faces a rather ruder awakening on his return home. There are few tailors ready to knock him up a suit in a couple of days for a couple of hundred quid. Domestic staff are, on the whole, an endangered species in modern Britain. A lady of my acquaintance was taken aback to discover that not only did she have to go to the supermarket, but she was also expected to pack her own bags (she had also forgotten that the point of a self-service petrol station is that you serve yourself).

“Will nobody think of the former expats?” is not, I grant you, a rallying cry for the ages. People are what people are. There are few of us, if we are honest, who do not derive a soupcon of pleasure from our fellows being cut down to what we think is their appropriate size (generally slightly smaller than ourselves). “Welcome back to the real world” we think, imagining that the circumstances of our particular lives have a monopoly on metaphysical reality.

But the coming decade will, I think, for many be akin to an expat’s home-coming, particularly for those who have been forced to don a rictus grin while listening to another of their old frenemy’s charming anecdotes about their entertainingly incompetent Filipino domestic. Just like their more widely-travelled peers, Britain’s middle class will be forced to confront the fact that, what had seemed to be a permanently high plateau of good living was, actually, the product of a particular set of circumstances which have now come to an end.

If expat lives are made more pleasant by an unending supply of cheap foreign labour, so are those of the British middle class. It is workers from overseas who make their food and look after parents in their dotage, it is students from abroad who pick up the financial slack to keep universities solvent. Immigration is, however, no longer the flavour of the month. Even the Labour party is planning to reduce it. But fewer cheap foreign workers means more expensive domestic labour. Which means higher prices. Fewer foreign students means either fewer universities (and thus university places) or higher fees. Immigration is not an issue which interests me much either way, but restrict it, and someone will have to pay (a fact those on that side of the debate are strangely loath to acknowledge).

If expats profit from taxes that are low (or non-existent for those whose employers pay them or who have taken the Gulf States’ dinar), so have those who stayed behind. I realise that this will have some spluttering into their screens and I await the emails pointing out that the tax burden is at a record high, but taxes are low compared to what they should be. The government runs permanent deficits, debt-to-GDP is at historic levels and still nothing works (this is, of course, before the impact of an ageing society is truly felt). Absent some productivity miracle, either things stay as they are (and people who can afford to increasingly pay for private alternatives to public services), the government stops doing many of the things it does now (Fancy paying for a GP appointment? How about turning motorways into toll roads?) or it raises taxes. Whichever way, someone will have to pay.

Still, at least there are house-prices to fall back on. Aren’t there? An obvious way to juice productivity would be to build hundreds of thousands of new homes in the South-East. Why would Labour want to protect an area which does not vote for it? Immigration restrictions under the Tories will reduce marginal demand. Higher mortgage rates under both parties will reduce marginal demand and hit those who have yet to pay them off.

The obvious solution to Britain’s decades of fiscal pass the parcel is to soak the rich. But there aren’t enough of them and the experience of wealth taxes (looking at you, France) suggests that they will either find a way of avoiding them or just leave. The patriotism of many is pocket-deep. With the poor being, well, too poor to help, predatory eyes will turn to the middle class. The cry will go up that while taxes are high for Britain, they are low compared to nice, cuddly Scandinavia. Who wouldn’t want public services that work? Who wouldn’t want to “pay their fair share” for them? Because someone will have to pay.

And so, in the next ten years time, Britain’s stay-at-home middle class will realise its kinship with its returned expat friends. Neither was as rich as they thought they were because, ultimately, someone always has to pay.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.