Jim Ratcliffe’s immigration rant is built on a lie

Wealthy elites deflecting blame has landed us in this mess

Sir Jim Ratcliffe left Britain to reduce his tax bill. Now he says Britain “can’t afford” immigration - based on completely bogus statistics.

This sums up the whole so-called “debate” about immigration in the UK: rich people spreading misinformation so that ordinary people blame The Foreigner for problems caused by elites.

The Manchester United owner said: “I mean, the UK is being colonised. It’s costing too much money. The UK has been colonised by immigrants.”

He claimed that the population had increased from 58 million in 2020 to 70 million now - an increase of 12 million. This is a wildly false claim: it was 67 million in 2020, and hasn’t been around 58 million for over a quarter of a century.

Surely someone worth £17 billion can afford to pay someone to use Google?

As for the term ‘colonised’: here is a reminder of our failure to come to terms with the horrors of colonialism. I was in Kenya last year, meeting with survivors of the Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s. The British had stolen their land, and now drove indigenous people into concentration camps, engaging in mass slaughter and torture.

It was so hideous that even right-wing racist Tory politician Enoch Powell condemned it.

That’s just one example of the horrors of European colonialism - an evil defined by violent subjugation, up to and including genocide.

Jim Ratcliffe, of course, moved to the famed tax haven Monaco in 2020 at the peak of the Covid pandemic - when his country was on its knees. It was estimated at the time that he would pay £4 billion less in taxes for his country’s exchequer. So he’s actually a migrant - or in his terms, someone colonising Monaco.

He talks about how the UK, which he’s technically abandoned, can’t afford things, when he’s made sure that he’s no longer paying taxes to support the NHS, education, and public services.

And before that, way back in 2010, his chemicals giant INEOS moved to Switzerland in the hope of saving £100 million in tax a year. It received the consent of its lenders at the time, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, both of which had been bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions after crashing the economy.

A classic of the genre of ‘migrant bashers are raging patriots’.

He may have left the country to avoid paying taxes - but his profits depends on British state largesse. He depends on state spending on roads, bridges, ports, rail, power grids, gas networks, water, and flood defences.

He relies on the state spending on human capital - publicly funded schools, universities, apprenticeships - that give his workforce training and education - as well as a healthcare system that keeps them able to work.

He depends on the state spending money on protecting his property, as well as state-funded research.

He depends on tax credits paid to his workers, as well as his company getting tax reliefs and investment allowances

More specifically, Jim Ratcliffe’s chemical firms have received £70m in state aid over the last 4 years, and the government has offered a £50m grant and guaranteed a £75 million loan for his Ineos Grangemouth chemical plant.

His claims that we cannot afford immigration represents a total inversion of reality.

He’s the owner of Manchester United football club. It has a vast, diverse global fan base, who I’m sure will be delighted by these comments.

But as for Manchester United’s main squad: 15 out of the 21 players are foreign-born: that is, over 70%. Manchester United would collapse without immigration - and it’s not the only institution that would suffer such a fate.

Ratcliffe says we can’t afford immigration, but our most important institution, the NHS, would collapse as well. Over 36% of our doctors and 30% of our nurses are foreign nationals.

Our birth rate has collapsed, plunging to 1.41 children per woman. To keep a country’s population stable - taking immigration out of the equation - it needs to be around 2.1. Given that we have an ageing population, we have ever-growing numbers of pensioners who need to be supported by a working-age population; otherwise, we face ever-growing spending on older people and ever fewer taxes paid by workers.

Without immigration, that means higher taxes and spending cuts.

As a report found the other week, if net migration comes to an end, the economy would be 3.6% smaller than 2040, and the deficit would be bigger by £37 billion.

Migrants pay in more than they receive. This morning, it was revealed that the UK’s quarterly growth was a paltry 0.1%. I’d note that immigration to this country has been plunging, and because our economic model is so broken, lower levels of immigration also means even less growth.

When immigration reaches net zero, what are those who blame immigration for all our ills going to say? They’re going to run out of excuses for why wages are so low, services are in such a mess, why there’s a housing crisis - we could go on.

But alas, Sir Jim Ratcliffe is far from the only member of the wealthy elite who has fed false claims about immigration to the British public. Media owners have done exactly the same.

For example, 13% of the UK’s population are immigrants. But when voters ar asked to guess the number, the average guess is 28%. Among Reform UK voters, that’s 34%.

Here’s another revealing figure. The polling shows that 52% consider immigration and asylum important issues facing the country, making them second only to the cost of living.

But if you ask what the most important issues are to them in their local issue, only 26% choose immigration and asylum - that is, half the percentage nationally, meaning that it only comes in at number 7, below the cost of living, health, the economy, crime, housing and jobs and unemployment.

Britain has been trapped in stagnation, decline and crisis for so long precisely because the focus on immigration has deflected attention away from the real problems. And there’s a reason for that: because that would mean challenging the interests of our wealthy elites. Our future depends on escaping this nightmare.