The comments from Sir Jim Ratcliffe in relation to the idea that Britain has been colonised by immigrants need careful unpacking. This is a man who lives in Monaco as a tax exile, avoiding £4 billion in taxation; he is arguably Britain’s seventh-richest man and is a part-owner of Manchester United Football Club. These comments were made as part of an interview in relation to economic issues, and he made the statement which has created a lot of frustration and anger on different sides of the political spectrum. Some say, ‘Well, actually, the population has increased from 58 million to 71 million from 2002, not 2020,’ so he only got that wrong; which is somewhat ironic, because this is a billionaire who should arguably know his numbers. Nevertheless, this is how his supporters defend him. They also bring up statistics to say that the population increase in Britain has been significantly higher than elsewhere across the European Union, and that this is somehow a problem of open borders, which only really took off after the Boris Johnson government came into power. It is also incredible because much of this immigration is legal, desired, and created as a result of gaps in the labour market to be filled by those who would need to come from outside the country, because it could not be filled by indigenous populations who simply did not possess the skill sets. Currently, there are approximately 9 million people on unemployment or work-related benefits; 77% are White English. Of the 12 million or so who have arrived in Britain since 2002, about half are from the Global South, in places like Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines; about half are from European Union countries; and about 5% are from non-EU white countries like Australia, South Africa, Canada, and Ukraine.
Therefore, saying that the UK has been colonised by immigrants is a feature of the idea that perhaps these immigrants are undesirable or somehow taking over, reflecting some broader connotations related to the Great Replacement Theory, which has become a trope of the far right and the radical right. If this were a one-off comment from this senior entrepreneur, it would not be seen as anything more than an aberration in a political landscape that is fraught with wildly divergent political opinion. However, it comes on the back of the growing narrative of the Reform Party, which is definitively taking a very hostile stance on immigration. We also have former Tory MP and cabinet minister Robert Jenrick talking about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, Birmingham. We have a former Tory MP, Sarah Pochin, talking about the lack of white faces on television. We also have a former Tory MP who used the language of ‘invasion’ when she was Home Secretary. There seems to be a continuity that is quite resistant to change; in fact, it is intensifying. That is why this is a problem. The other issue is that colonisation suggests power, control, exploitation, manipulation, corruption, deceit, violence, imprisonment, and incarceration, which were all patterns of the European colonial world domination paradigm. Colonisation is not a friendly endeavour; it often results in huge levels of violence, destruction, and exploitation, and ultimately drains an economy of its natural resources, including all of the skill sets of its people and including its people themselves.
Projecting that immigrants are somehow colonising suggests that there is some hostile takeover going on which will eliminate and ultimately erase white British cultural heritage and ethnicity. This is also deeply falling into the Great Replacement Theory paradigms that are such powerful forces in the imagination of various political and business actors, including big tech players such as Elon Musk. So, it is not a simple case of a slip of the tongue on the part of a businessman who is literally an emigrant—that he would rather live elsewhere in order to avoid taxes and then comment on his country of birth as somehow having been invaded. It is part of a sinister shift; a wider narrative seeks to place problems in society due to bad policy, bad economics, and bad public sector decision-making by placing them in the hands of immigrants and minorities who have only come to the country based on invitation and opportunity that has been created through their skill sets and their motivations, trying to keep Britain going when it is otherwise stalling or even looking backwards, especially when we think about Brexit and what lay behind all of that. Britain is a diverse, multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious landscape, and it is all the better and all the stronger for it. The real worry now is more along the lines of Christian nationalism and ethno-nationalism, and the conflation between these two is almost certainly likely to occur in the future. Britain has changed very fast, but a certain set of people are simply out of touch and out of sync, and they are being called out.
The real worry is a certain majority population in this country that is not very educated, sadly, and doesn’t have the critical faculty that is needed, unfortunately, and too easily believes a very simple narrative presented by certain political actors who explain away all the problems by placing them on others—namely immigrants and minorities. This is classical; it is very much part of a historical playbook that has been in play for centuries and certainly for decades, and it is a divide-and-rule strategy by the exploiting classes of society who use this language to maintain their position and stop people from asking difficult questions. And it is all coming to a head, and it will boil over inevitably. It is really unfortunate, but it is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But let us not wait on hope for the better; let us just work to ensure that more people maintain their critical faculties and are courageous enough to ask tough questions and expect proper answers. And this is the only way we are going to hold power to account.