Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics in his head. But how typical that the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues, as well as the Guardian and many others, have chosen to latch onto a loose remark the billionaire Manchester United co-owner made about migration rather than address the very genuine concerns he has for the UK economy.
Read between the heavily edited clips from Sky News’s interview with the chemicals entrepreneur and the point he was trying to make when he said that Britain is “being colonised by immigrants” is clear. You cannot grow an economy healthily when you have an ever-expanding number of people on out-of-work benefits. The result is that employers have been forced to turn to migrant labour to fill the gaps. That has helped the economy to grow in recent years, although only just – real GDP per capita is only just ahead of where it was in 2007 – but it has come at the price of putting greater stress on public services and the housing stock.
The growth in people on out-of-work benefits over the past decade has been astounding: up from less than 4 million to 6.5 million. The extra numbers who are economically inactive are a huge deadweight to be carried along by those who are in work. If we want a healthy economy we are going to have to reverse that growth in people parked on out-of-work benefits.
The point Ratcliffe was trying to make when he said Britain is “being colonised by immigrants” is clear
When Labour was elected in 2024 some of its ministers were prepared to say this, and were up for doing something about it. “What we won’t do,” said the Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden last March, “is sit back and relax and pretend it is a progressive thing to do to watch two million, then three million, then four million people go on to these benefits – many of them never working again.” But then meaningful welfare reforms were blocked by the Labour Left and all went quiet.
Similarly, the government seemed up to tackling expanding levels of illegal migration. It may soon be able to boast of having reduced overall migration – with net migration possibly even falling below zero later this year. But this is not for positive reasons. The huge plunge has been in health care workers coming to Britain, along with other skilled workers, and also fewer students coming to study here. Illegal migration, by contrast, is still on the rise – and the European Convention on Human Rights continues to prevent us deporting foreign criminals. We are getting exactly the wrong kind of migrants – the kind who are imposing a burden of the economy rather than helping to grow it. The government has no answer to this.
Nor does it have an answer to crisis in the UK chemicals industry – Ratcliffe’s own industry – which is being driven to extinction through high energy prices. Britain has the highest industrial energy prices of any country measured by the International Energy Agency, and yet still we have an energy secretary in Ed Miliband who is trying to gaslight us by repeating the mantra that his policies are lowering energy prices.
How much easier it is to wrongly cry ‘racist’ at one of the country’s leading industrialists rather than address the issues which he can see are dragging down the country. Sadly, with Labour now looking like taking a sharp turn to the Left, I fear we are going to see rather more of this sort of thing.
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