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In 2020, the year Sir Jim Ratcliffe moved his huge fortune to Monaco, migrants in the United Kingdom made tax contributions estimated to be worth around £20bn. Sir Jim, by jetting off to a tax haven on the French Riviera, saved himself an estimated £4bn. It took some brass neck for the expat owner of Ineos and co-owner of Manchester United football club to lecture the country, using inflammatory and offensive language, on the perils of immigration.
Where to begin? The statistics used by Sir Jim to back his claim that Britain was being “colonised” by migrants, in an interview with Sky News, were flatly wrong. They were also astonishingly crass, coming from a man who presides over a sporting institution famous for and proud of its global fanbase and international connections.
Current Manchester United stars such as Cameroon’s Bryan Mbeumo and Côte d’Ivoire’s Amad Diallo will doubtless have their views on Sir Jim’s intervention. So will its French former icon, Eric Cantona – another coloniser whose genius generated a memorable outpouring of francophilia on the red side of Manchester. Representatives of the club’s many Muslim followers have already given theirs, questioning whether they should feel welcome in United’s Old Trafford stadium.
The Ineos owner’s football interests have given his comments a prominence they would not have otherwise had. But the willingness of a high-profile public figure to echo great replacement theory tropes is yet another disturbing sign of the times.
Sir Keir Starmer was right to describe Sir Jim’s as “offensive and wrong” on Thursday. But he himself was obliged last summer to express belated regret for asserting that Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”. Reform UK’s highest-profile recruit, Robert Jenrick, has notoriously noted the absence of white faces in a district of Birmingham. The previously unsayable is being routinely said, as Nigel Farage and Reform shift the parameters of legitimate speech in British public life.
A rattled Sir Jim has issued a statement in which he regretted causing offence but asserted the need for “open debate”. Normalising inflammatory language which presents migrants as hostile invaders does not enhance the possibility of civilised discussion. It contributes to the rise of everyday racism and xenophobia on the UK’s streets.
Perhaps the most eloquent response to Sir Jim’s comments has come from the Manchester Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, who said that they betrayed the values for which the city traditionally stood. In the 19th century, its mill workers went on strike in solidarity with enslaved cotton-pickers in the American south. As Reform seeks a statement victory in Gorton and Denton, with a candidate who has made dog-whistle nativism his calling card, Manchester has again become a political crucible.
Mr Burnham, who was denied his wish to run against Reform in that race, is on one side of that fight. The Oldham-born co-owner of arguably England’s most famous football club has given an interview that plays to the talking points of the other. As Nigel Farage’s intellectual outriders speak of a “politics of home”, which casts doubt over certain citizens’ right to be considered British, a billionaire tax exile in Monaco has added grist to their mill. The irony will not be lost on most Mancunians, despite panicked attempts by Manchester United to limit the fallout. But the potential damage done is no laughing matter.
