You’ve got to admire Sir Jim Ratcliffe. It takes a certain kind of genius to build a bonfire out of football tribalism, Brexit politics, tax avoidance, right-wing dog whistles and historical colonial sensitivity, set fire to it and then throw yourself on top. As self-immolative performance art goes, it is unbeatable.
The Manchester United co-owner managed to offend almost everyone this week by declaring that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants”. Not “immigration has risen” or “we need border controls” or any of the hundred ways you can open a debate on migration policy without sounding like you’re auditioning for Reform UK. No, he reached for “colonised” – the one word guaranteed to make historians wince, former British colonies seethe, and Man United’s Muslim Supporters Club issue a statement questioning your basic decency.
The Monaco resident – Sir Jim moved there in 2020, saving himself an estimated £4 billion in tax – also found time to claim Britain’s population had risen from 58 million in 2020 to 70 million now. The actual figure was 67 million in 2020. But why let the Office for National Statistics ruin a good rant?
This is the same Sir Jim who wants UK taxpayer money for his stadium project. The same Sir Jim whose football club employs players from a multitude of nationalities and whose fanbase spans the globe. The same Sir Jim whose club’s success was built by Cristiano Ronaldo, Eric Cantona, and generations of immigrants who apparently “colonised” Old Trafford into 13 Premier League titles.
Even the masterful wordsmith Kelvin MacKenzie couldn’t save him. The former Sun editor gamely tried, pointing out that Ratcliffe has “paid more tax than his critics combined” – which would be more persuasive if Ratcliffe still lived somewhere with income tax.
Admiring Kelvin’s masterful display of cognitive dissonance, Duncan Bannatyne declared “I’m in”, before launching into a diatribe about billionaires in Monaco being different from boat arrivals because they’ve “paid into the system”. A bold claim about someone whose entire Monaco strategy was specifically designed to stop paying into the system. On Dragons’ Den, that would get you five outs and a clip on YouTube titled ‘Worst Pitch Ever’. Even Kelvin must have been wishing Duncan were a silent partner.
The Conservatives used to own this particular form of incompetence. Remember when they’d roll out some backbencher to say the quiet bit loud, then spend three days in damage control? Now billionaires are doing it for sport. (I look forward to Sir Jim’s next venture: a new sport called the Gobshite Games.)
There’s a lesson here for those of us trying to rebuild trust in institutions. Credibility isn’t just about policy positions. It’s about whether you’ve earned the right to lecture. It’s about basic consistency between your words and your life. It’s about not wildly inventing statistics that a Year 9 could fact-check in thirty seconds.
Sir Jim will be fine, of course. He’s £17 billion fine. But Manchester United – already protesting his ticket prices and job cuts before this – now has an owner that significant chunks of its own fanbase find embarrassing. That’s the real damage. Not to him. To the institution he’s supposed to steward.
He has, of course, apologised now, in the way that prominent sufferers of verbal incontinence often do, effectively saying, “I’m sorry if you misunderstood me”. In Sir Jim’s eyes, all of us are too thick to appreciate the wisdom of what he was saying and would prefer to focus on one badly chosen word. Except, of course, it wasn’t just a single word and it wasn’t used just once. It was the keystone of an argument that seeks to blame all of our woes on a small group of people whose “faces don’t fit”.
When people with power this badly misjudge the room, they don’t just harm themselves. They corrode faith in everything they touch. Including, unfortunately, any legitimate conversation about immigration policy – which gets harder when billionaires colonise the debate with nonsense.
* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames
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11 Comments
I have far more respect for the ‘economic migrants’ who arrive here to work, pay tax, etc. than for a billionaire who ’emigrates’ to avoid paying tax..
I have never thought it fair that people who choose to emigrate and live out their lives in a foreign country still retain the right to vote in elections in the UK. All the more so when they – like Jim Ratcliffe – don’t even pay any UK taxes.
We really need to do something about how easy it is for people to move to tax havens to avoid tax. The first thing we should do is tax people by citizenship like America does, if they don’t want to remain a citizen they’d still have to pay tax to the UK if they live anywhere with a lower tax rate.
Ideally we would take additional measures against tax havens by banning any companies or individuals registered in them from doing business in the UK.
And of course we should force UK overseas territories and crown dependencies into charging similar rates of tax on wealthy individuals and corporations.
Obviously, Ratcliffe’s remarks were ill-informed and factually incorrect, but let’s not be so naive as to think that they don’t resonate with a considerable number of voters. Demographic changes in many towns have been rapid, and voters feel very uncomfortable with that. Record inward immigration hasn’t brought the economic benefits that so many used to declare. Communities that were already struggling—those rapid changes have just compounded issues.
Who would think that having hundreds of HMOs in communities is somehow enriching the area? Too many on the left look at this from a luxury position located afar. Not acknowledging that there are significant issues is like saying Sweden is the poster boy of multiculturalism.
@Joan Summers: I like many other UK emigrants pay some tax in the UK and some where I live.
In my case, I have to admire Tom for his masterful evisceration of Sir Jim in his opening paragraph. I have to confess to both envy of the elegant metaphor he employed, and to a certain amount of sadistic pleasure in seeing an entitled billionaire getting what he deserved.
But that said, if Ratcliffe was dog-whistling to the ‘left behind’ people looking for someone to blame, he might not, to borrow a phrase from Muhammad Ali, be as dumb as he looks.
Let’s hope that this does not turn out to be a ‘Gerald Ratner’ moment for the billionaire who may well rule the day when he uttered such the phrase ‘colonised by immigrants’. The FA have already launched an investigation into Sir Jim’s comments with the possibility of a review by the Premier League into Sir Jim’s suitability for co-ownership of one the League’s football clubs ‘Fit and Proper’ person test. I can only imagine what his shareholders at Ineos are saying..
Why does Manchester United need a separate Muslim supporters club? Does it have a Christian supporters club? Or an Atheists supporters club?
Michael; If you don’t align yourself with certain viewpoints – it makes you unfit to hold a senior position in a private company ?
How very liberal. Ratcliffe is entitled to his opinion as much as anyone else. Being born in a Lancashire council house – he probably has more understanding of communities who find their towns barely recognisable than most who post on here.
We shouldn’t have given him the ICI Chlor Alkali division for virtually nothing.
@ Ambighter
“Why does Manchester United need a separate Muslim supporters club?”
Probably for the same kind of reason Reform Ltd has the “Reform Jewish Alliance (RJA)”