Bashing Jim Ratcliffe won’t save Keir Starmer’s skin

‘The UK’s got a lot of problems, we can all see that. Economy, crime, education, health. It’s not a great place to be at the moment.’

That was Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chemicals tycoon, part-owner of Manchester United and one of the UK’s richest men, speaking to Sky News on the sidelines of the European Industry Summit in Antwerp on Wednesday. To most, it was a relatively uncontroversial take on Keir Starmer’s Britain. But it was what he said next that has left him at the bottom of a ferocious pile-on.

‘The UK’s been colonised’, Ratcliffe said, apropos of nothing. His interviewer repeated that last word back to him incredulously. ‘The UK’s being colonised by immigrants, isn’t it?’, said Ratcliffe once again. ‘The population of the UK was 58million in 2020’, he added. ‘Now it’s 70million. That’s 12million people!’

Ratcliffe’s comments have gone down about as well as you could imagine with Labour and the left. Starmer jumped on X to demand Ratcliffe apologise. The same prime minister who less than a year ago said immigration had made Britain an ‘island of strangers’ called the billionaire’s comments ‘offensive and wrong’, because the UK is (repeat after me) a ‘proud, tolerant and diverse country’. He accused Ratcliffe of playing ‘into the hands of those that want to divide our country’.

For much of the British left, Ratcliffe’s comments appear to be the most exciting development since Nigel Farage was accused of making anti-Semitic comments as a schoolboy, 49 years ago. Labour may have no clue what it stands for, but it certainly knows who it stands against. And it loves nothing more than the chance to call those people ‘racist’.

For a few hours on Thursday morning, Labour found itself in possession of the one thing it has lacked in more than 18 months of government: a unifying message. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said Ratcliffe’s comments were ‘insulting, inflammatory and should be withdrawn’. Justice secretary Jake Richards said Ratcliffe was a hypocrite because he himself had emigrated to Monaco for tax purposes. It was as if the knackered Labour Party had suddenly found its voice again – its boundless sense of self-righteousness had now been restored.

Ratcliffe’s status as part-owner of Manchester United has also provided an excuse for various footballing organisations to join the frenzy. The Football Association is investigating whether Ratcliffe has ‘brought the game into disrepute’. Show Racism the Red Card said Ratcliffe’s comments would ‘stigmatise migrant communities, fuel division and legitimise hostility towards minority groups’. Kick It Out, football’s anti-discrimination campaign group, said Ratcliffe had been ‘disgraceful and deeply divisive’. The Manchester United Supporters Trust, the Manchester United Muslim Supporters Club and the 1958 supporters’ group have given their two cents, too. All agreed that Ratcliffe’s comments were scandalous.

It is fair to say that Ratcliffe has made himself an easy target for this orgy of righteous indignation. He himself has since apologised for causing offence with the term ‘colonised’. The immigration figures he cited were also inaccurate by some margin. The population of the UK was 67million in 2020, not 58million, as he claimed. Had he referred to the year 2000, however, he would have been on far stronger footing.

Still, Labour’s ferocious response is also telling. Ratcliffe may have got his facts wrong and used fairly spicy language, but there is no denying that migration has spiralled out of control in recent years. More than six million migrants have arrived in the UK since 2020 – the vast majority under the previous Conservative government. The headline ‘net migration’ figures usually cited by the media may be far lower than this. But this is only because of the extraordinarily high levels of emigration over the same period, with more than 3.5million people leaving Britain seeking a better life elsewhere. As the Office for National Statistics admitted last year, many more of these emigrants were British citizens than previously reported. In 2024, more than 250,000 Britons left the country.

This might not amount to ‘colonisation’, but an unprecedented demographic shift has clearly taken place. Dismissing Ratcliffe’s comments as racist or far right won’t do anything to change this fact. Labour may think it has taken the moral high ground, but it looks to most people like a party in denial.

Ratcliffe’s adlibbed reflections on immigration weren’t the only thing that shocked and outraged the left. ‘You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits’, he also said. But here Ratcliffe was more or less on the money. There are more than seven million working-age people claiming Universal Credit, roughly 15 per cent of whom are not British citizens. You do not need to be a billionaire businessman to see this is a sign of an unhealthy economy and yet more proof of a broken immigration system.

The comments attracting all of the headlines were made by Ratcliffe in the final two minutes of a 15-minute interview. Labour and Starmer would do well to watch the whole thing. The INEOS founder said the chemicals sector in the UK – on which pharmaceuticals, agriculture, defence and manufacturing depend – is facing ‘unsurvivable conditions’. He warned that industrial energy costs are now up to four times higher in the UK than they are in America. Meanwhile, carbon taxes in Europe have quadrupled since 2024. ‘It means you can’t make any money’, was his blunt assessment. The result of Net Zero, Ratcliffe said, was that the UK is offshoring its heavy industries to coal-intensive economies like China. The economy is being sacrificed, in other words, without even benefitting the environment.

Ratcliffe’s migration comments might have provided the left with what it thought was a free kick. But rather than revelling in calling him a bigot, the Labour Party would do well to heed his warnings. Voters are overwhelmingly opposed to mass immigration, deindustrialisation and the ballooning welfare state. In the battle between Keir Starmer and Jim Ratcliffe, Starmer has come out looking even more aloof and out of touch with the British people than a Monaco-based billionaire. Labour has – once again – let its preening self-righteousness cloud its political judgement.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.