The Emirates Pull the Plug: When the Golden Goose Objects to the Feed

The UAE has officially removed Britain from its approved list for state scholarships, citing a fear of campus radicalisation.

While the academic establishment reels from the financial blow, they remain blind to the reality: they have spent years hosting the very ideologies that their biggest donors consider an existential threat.

If you listen closely to the prevailing westerly wind this morning, past the usual noise of political incompetence and cultural decay, you might just catch the faint, high-pitched sound of dozens of university Vice-Chancellors simultaneously hyperventilating into brown paper bags.

The news this week that the United Arab Emirates has formally stripped the United Kingdom of its status as a destination for state-funded scholarships is more than a diplomatic snub. It is an existential tremor running through the fault lines of UK Higher Education Plc. For the 2025/26 academic year, the list of approved institutions includes the US, France, and even Israel—but the British university, once the crown jewel of the Gulf elite’s educational journey, is nowhere to be found.

And oh, the reason given. It is exquisite.

The Emirati authorities are concerned about the risk of radicalisation on UK campuses.

The Two Faces of the ‘Radical’

For decades, the term ‘radicalisation’ in a university context conjured images of intense young men in damp basements swapping VHS tapes of fiery clerics. That was the old fear. The UAE’s new fear is twofold—and entirely of our own making.

On one hand, they aren’t terrified of bearded zealots; they are terrified of purple-haired intersectionality graduates who have spent three years learning that everything, including the monarchy that paid for their degree, is a construct of oppressive patriarchal colonialism that must be dismantled. The UAE sends its brightest to learn engineering and finance, not to learn how to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ or stage an encampment on the VC’s lawn.

But behind the cultural comedy lies a darker truth. The UAE is looking at a very real security threat that the British establishment has spent the better part of a decade trying to ignore: the Red-Green synthesis.

The Unholy Alliance: The Red-Green Synthesis

We must call it by its name. The Red-Green synthesis is the deeply cynical, intellectually bankrupt marriage between the radical academic Left (Red) and the networks of political Islam (Green).

On campus, the language of the jihadist and the language of the sociology professor have merged into a single, shrill anti-Western roar. They share the same targets: Western liberalism, the nation-state, and the ‘oppressive’ structures of the global order. The university provides the intellectual cover—the ‘decolonisation’ and the ‘intersectionality’—while groups like the Muslim Brotherhood provide the ideological fervour. It is a pincer movement designed to hollow out the very foundations of the society that hosts it.

The ‘Sanctuary State’ and the Ghost of Jenkins

While we play-act at ‘British values’, the UAE has been keeping a list. In the Gulf, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a debating society; it is a proscribed terrorist organisation. In Britain, they are treated with the polite, confused indulgence we usually reserve for eccentric uncles.

We have known about this for over a decade. The 2014 Jenkins Review, a government-commissioned investigation into the Brotherhood, was unequivocal: it found that the group’s ideology is ‘contrary to British values’ and ‘contrary to national security’.

The result of that review? Absolute inertia. A decade of cowardice.

By refusing to proscribe the Brotherhood, the UK has created a ‘sanctuary state’ for political Islamists. The UAE has previously flagged and designated several UK-based organisations as terrorist fronts—entities that continue to operate in Britain with near-total impunity. As recently as January 2025, the UAE Cabinet added 19 individuals and 8 UK-based entities to its local terror list, including Cambridge Education and Training Centre Ltd, Future Graduates Ltd, and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).

To the Emiratis, these aren’t just names on a spreadsheet; they are the infrastructure of an ideology designed to topple their state. They look at our campuses and see a bubble where Brotherhood-aligned speakers share stages with activists who view the West as the ultimate villain.

The Data Britain Ignores

The UAE is watching the data our own Home Office only admits under duress. In the year ending March 2025, Prevent referrals reached record levels. On top of that, during the 2023─24 cycle, 70 students at UK universities were flagged specifically for Islamist radicalisation, nearly double the previous year.

The UAE isn’t waiting for the British state to grow a backbone. They have simply decided that if the British government won’t police its own campuses, they will vote with their feet—and their checkbooks.

The Price of Hypocrisy

The irony is so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. For years, British universities have operated on a business model that is intellectually dishonest and financially precarious. They have eagerly gobbled up countless billions in international student fees from autocratic regimes, using that cash to turn their campuses into ideological Petri dishes designed to alienate the very cultures paying the bills.

We took the Petro-dollar with one hand and used the other to wave a placard denouncing everything the Petro-dollar stands for. We allowed the Brotherhood to entrench itself in our civil society while claiming to be ‘global Britain’.

The British university sector is now like a luxury hotel whose concierge spits on the guests as they walk through the door, while the basement is being used by the guests’ sworn enemies to plan a coup. Eventually, the guests stop booking rooms.

The panic in the bursaries today is real. If the UAE walks, the Saudis might follow. And if the Gulf decides that a British degree is no longer a prestige asset but an ideological liability, the whole house of cards collapses. We are about to find out what happens when the Golden Goose finally realises it’s being fed poison and decides to fly elsewhere.