In a Sky News interview yesterday, Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s seventh richest man, said that “the UK is being colonised by immigrants”. Okay. Building on this, he turned his mind to the population of the UK, claiming that we had “58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million”. According to the Office for National Statistics, the population of the UK was 67 million in 2020, and the last time it was 58 million was in 1995.
But if not through numeracy, how did he make those billions? For a start, the British state (that lumbering, unsustainable beast he now condemns) gave him a pretty solid leg-up. Mr Ratcliffe was raised in a council house, attended a grammar school, and then had his university education in chemical engineering paid for by the British taxpayer: a publicly funded launchpad into the industry that would eventually make him one of the richest men in the country.
And his torrid relationship with the state didn’t end at graduation. In the last four years alone, his chemical companies have received over £100 million in UK state aid. One hundred million Great British pounds from us, the taxpayer. With this logic, government support is a moral failure when it keeps a single mother out of poverty, but a sensible industrial strategy when it props up his petrochemicals empire. Some benefits, it would seem, are more equal than others. Of course, a huge proportion of benefits in the UK go not to the workshy caricatures of tabloid folklore, but to people who are actually in work. His understanding of that fact appears to be about as sturdy as his grasp of population data. For example, cleaners at his company, INEOS, earn between £23,000-£25,000. When wages are that low, the state can step in to top them up. In other words, taxpayers are not only subsidising the profits of one of Britain’s richest men, but also his labour costs.
In 2020, he relocated his tax residency to Monaco. Immigrants, on the other hand, are forecast by the OBR to pay £17.5 billion in taxes to His Majesty’s Treasury between 2024 and 2029 – more than Ratcliffe’s entire net worth But of course, it is those immigrant nurses, warehouse workers, construction workers, and key staff who are the evil colonisers – not the economic migrant to Monaco. Still, one must give him this: at least he’s minimised his tax payments, rather than decamping to Dubai like the rest of the amateur hour.
His signalling isn’t even consistent. In 2016 he gifted £25 million to London Business School, the institution where he earned his MBA, a handsome sum. It seems he is perfectly willing to give £25 million to a business school, he is rather less enthusiastic about giving back to the state that housed him, schooled him, funded his university education and, more recently, handed his companies tens of millions in support.
Ignoring his attitude towards tax for a moment, it’s not even as though he is giving back to the people of the United Kingdom in his personal endeavours. At Manchester United, he raised ticket prices, abolished concessions for children and pensioners, laid off staff and cut the free lunches of low-paid service workers, all while some players earned thousands sitting on the bench. He even had the brass neck to seek hundreds of millions more in public subsidy for a new stadium.
He also had no problem warmly defending the billionaire majority owners, the Glazer family, who have drained more than £1 billion out of the club over their 20-year ownership to line their own pockets. They are, he assures us, really nice people who have simply endured a rough patch of PR. Being foreign makes you a coloniser; billionaires yoinking huge sums from a much diminished club is totally fine. Got it.
Ratcliffe benefitted from the country’s subsidised schools, housing and public investment, built a fortune atop its workforce and infrastructure, accepted generous state subsidies for his companies, relocated, and then informed us that the real problem is working-class foreigners.
Our country has not been colonised by immigrants. It has been colonised by the billionaire class.
[Further reading: Does Jim Ratcliffe speak for England?]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment