Matt Bevan

They pay no taxes, no rent, no utility charges, no telephone bills.

Education for Qatari nationals is free, whether it's at home or at the most exclusive and expensive college abroad.

Health care is unlimited.

Qataris can fly to any specialist anywhere in the world, and the government will pick up the airfares, the doctor's bill, and the family's luxury hotel bill for as long as they're abroad.

Now, this sounds like an incredibly sweet deal.

And if you were one of the 40,000 odd Qataris, it really was.

Work was pretty much optional.

We encountered an elderly and delightful man working as an occasional government car driver.

Although he was a dollar millionaire,

But this decadent lifestyle had a couple of pretty dark clouds hanging over it.

For one thing, because Qataris didn't really need to work, they imported basically their entire labour force.

Most of the actual work in Qatar was done by migrant labourers and indentured servants.

By the 80s, the labourers outnumbered Qataris three to one and lived as a virtual underclass with almost none of the rights Qatari citizens had.

Menial tasks are reserved almost exclusively for non-Qataris.

They definitely didn't get free cars and unlimited health care.

It wasn't a particularly sweet deal for them.

The other dark cloud hanging over it all was Saudi Arabia.

Big Brother is Saudi Arabia, with which Qatar shares its only and unmarked land border.

Khalifa and his people live like kings, but only in the material sense.

They were reliant on Big Brother for security.