The only thing worse than Jim Ratcliffe’s comments was his ‘apology’
‘The UK is being colonised by immigrants’.
I spat out my Indian masala tea this morning reading these words.
A waste of the last gulp of warm spices and ginger went hurtling from my mouth onto my laptop.
I read it again.
‘You can’t afford – you can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in,” he said. “The UK is being colonised by immigrants, really, isn’t it?’
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After wiping my screen, I saw a photo of Jim Ratcliffe, the co-owner of Manchester United and CEO of petrochemical giant INEOS – the seventh richest man in Britain, who moved to tax-free Monaco in 2020 – next to the article.
Scouring the website to see the joke, the pun, the elaborate play on words, or the swift realisation he’d spoken in error and immediately retracted, I was left realising that he was being very serious.
He really believed that Britain was ‘colonised’ by immigrants, that those coming to the UK sincerely have taken control of this country.
But I don’t think Ratcliffe knows what the word colonised means.
While making a new cup of tea, I thought back to the stories I’ve heard about India when the British Raj colonised it.
A lot of my work now revolves around uncovering these stories and true histories of India during this time –- and I’ve even heard stories from my own family who went through Partition.
Even now, when I go to India now to visit the village where my family originated, I can still see the ways in which Britain’s reign has affected my people. Through a massive, centuries-long drain of wealth, the country’s poor are cruelly poor.
I once wept watching a video on India’s Partition Museum’s website, where an old woman – Sudershna Kumari – talks about the horrific crimes and deaths she witnessed as a young child.
Because it isn’t just an interesting bit of trivia from the past – it’s the very reason that many countries have refugees, through the legacy of displacement and economic disparity. And it has caused life-long and multi-generational trauma for many – the same trauma we see on the faces of asylum seekers who come to this country to seek shelter, not take over.
The joke I was looking for from Ratcliffe actually came this afternoon, when he issued a pathetic non-apology, saying ‘I am sorry that my choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe and caused concern but it is important to raise the issue of controlled and well-managed immigration that supports economic growth.’
It is classic gaslighting, implying the problem with his comments is that people took offence, not that they were offensive.
A true apology would have recognised his ignorance for the word colonialism itself, which for immigrant communities is not a throwaway adjective, but a blood-soaked reminder of suffering.
In the 1800s, India was a thriving country with a booming economy – generating 22.5% of the world’s GDP.
They already had problems from the Portuguese having colonised much of the Western coast for trade while brutally forcing Catholicism on Indians – they were the first to start to strip the land of its resources.
The East India Company was established in 1600, to trade in the Indian Ocean, challenging the Portuguese trade that already existed there. That’s when the British discovered a wealth of products including silks, tea and spices.
This was what initiated the beginnings of the British Raj, who came galloping along in 1858. They had an 89 year rule of the British Crown over India, where they engineered genocides, devised a murderous Partition, brought in their suffocating laws that stifled the lives of LGBTQ+ people and economically plundered the entire continent.
The country’s share of global GDP fell to less than 5%.
And the rest is history – or so I thought.
But it doesn’t feel like this billionaire understands that.
With Jim Ratcliffe’s colloquial use of the term ‘colonised’ – which to many ethnic people evokes images of murder and genocide – it feels almost like an attempt of dumbing down what the British did all those years ago.
It’s a grim echo of the past few years when right-wing agitators have said that British pupils should be taught a more ‘balanced’ view of British colonialism, and be told it wasn’t ‘all bad’.
Well it was, and Ratcliffe should think before he invokes it.
This is the same man who was pro-Brexit, and then ran off to Monaco where, conveniently, he doesn’t pay income or capital gains tax. He isn’t exactly a paragon of patriotic virtue.
However, his apparent qualms are with migrants – and like much of what the far-right are parroting, it is another uninformed sweeping statement that fuels a moral panic.
Colonisation isn’t defined by immigrants coming to a country to escape war, famine or treacherous situations to live in hotels that are protested against, are held up to different standards or deported back to unsafe countries.
It’s where a foreign power establishes control through trade, exploitation and settlement.
He doesn’t have a clue what he’s saying, and it’s honestly offensive, as is his half-hearted ‘apology.’
Ratcliffe’s sweeping statement is another example of how people in the UK are uneducated on the history of colonisation.
And I’m simply giving an example of India – the effects of colonisation are global.
In the 1700s, in Sierra Leone, when the British controlled the land after discovering their flourishing resource of diamonds, it monopolised the industry and mined their diamonds – blocking any Sierra Leoneans from profiting – and leaving a legacy of what we know as ‘Blood Diamonds’ today.
That is what colonisation looks like.
Not migrants escaping war.
So no Jim, Britain isn’t ‘colonised’.
And if we want to have a sensible discussion about immigration, we’ll look a bit closer to home than Monaco.
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