People Turn to Poison Quick

As the Buzzcocks sang in Ever Fallen in Love, “You spurn my natural emotions…” But I’m not talking romance here. I’m talking the spurning of a city’s plural identity.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of the Ineos chemicals group and co-owner of Manchester United—worth over £17 billion, and reckoned to be the seventh richest man in the country—has caused controversy after remarks made in a Sky News business interview.

Ratcliffe claimed the UK had been “colonised by immigrants,” suggesting, with a sideways glance and raised eyebrow, that immigration and high levels of welfare dependency were placing strain on the economy. He even cited population figures that do not appear to match official statistics.

The reaction was swift. Even some supporters admitted the figures and dates were wrong. Keir Starmer described the language as “offensive and wrong,” calling for an apology and emphasising that Britain is a diverse and tolerant country. Ratcliffe has since apologised for offending “some people.” Manchester United supporters’ groups condemned the comments as embarrassing and divisive.

You could almost hear that Manchester refrain: “How does it feel?”—not triumph, not Dylan, but the question New Order keep raising beneath the long groove of Blue Monday.

Anti-racism organisations warned that the rhetoric echoed accounts more commonly associated with the far right. Contrarian commentators like Brendan O’Neill argued instead that attention should be directed toward crimes committed by illegal migrants, citing the conviction of an Afghan man who raped a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton.

But one reason the story travelled so quickly was the irony at its centre. Ratcliffe has lived in Monaco since 2020, a move widely understood to reduce his UK tax obligations.

For many, this made his intervention feel less like grounded concern than political offshore drilling. In other words, strong words about the nation from someone who no longer fully shares its burdens.

Immigration is, of course, a legitimate subject for political debate. Housing, public services, labour markets, integration—they are genuine pressures. Increased immigration has been a fact of life here since the Blair years, growing right the way through a 14-year Tory government, leaving the door, to this day, seemingly wide open.

But the emotional register shifts when the question stops being “How should immigration be managed?” and becomes “What is being done to us?”

That is when it stops being a debate and becomes a mood—ugly, sinister.

Manchester’s poetry knows that Ratcliffe’s language belongs less to policy than to performance.

Or, as John Cooper Clarke reminds us, the louder the outrage, the thinner the substance:

“People turn to poison quick…”

And perhaps this is where the discomfort becomes most acute for Manchester United supporters.

Somewhere in the stands, a fan watches the team’s resurgence—late goals, momentum returning, the faint outline of a comeback season—feeling a nagging sickness.

The football is improving, the club is stirring, but part of the ownership speaks a language that does not belong to terraces where sport used to overrule everything—except the Munich Air Disaster.

A blast of cultural grievance and replacement is not welcome at Old Trafford.

Besides, Manchester United’s identity has always been global. It has always been immigrant. It has always been plural.

Talk of invasion is a modern Manchester contradiction. “I’m in debt to you for your unpleasantness,” sang Mark E. Smith of The Fall, as if in toxic anticipation.

The hypocrisy has become central to the coverage, but it is not the only issue. The word Ratcliffe chose—“colonised”—is doing a particular kind of work. It is also instantly recognisable. A form of rhetoric that circulates easily in the transatlantic culture-war economy. The sort of language that would not feel out of place in Donald Trump’s America, or in Elon Musk’s increasingly performative flirtations with grievance politics.

Anthony Burgess, writing from another Manchester century, understood how language can be both weapon and theatre. Politics as a kind of Clockwork performance, where words are less about truth than circumstance.

Burgess himself spent much of his life outside the UK and in his writing often framed himself as a voluntary exile. Yet one of his recurring themes was that English identity is not fixed, but performed—shaped by migration and mixture.

To be truly English, in the Burgess sense, is to be made out of layers of history, out of borrowing.

“England” is already a hybrid construction, whether culture warriors like it or not. Even the Anglo-Saxons came here after the Romans.

Patriotism is not just complaining about the country. It is living with its consequences, sharing responsibility.

“We’re so far away from where we started,” New Order sing—not romance, but estrangement. Or the wealthy untethered from the place they still claim to speak for.

Ratcliffe’s defenders argue that immigration levels should be discussed, and they are right. But the framing matters.

When debate slithers into historically loaded language and scapegoating, it stops being about solutions and becomes identity politics dressed up as realism.

There is, too, an unavoidable contradiction. Immigrants are treated as threat while remaining essential—staffing hospitals, building businesses, running rail services, working in universities, even scoring goals for the club Ratcliffe co-owns.

Manchester has always been built on arrivals—Irish labour, Caribbean communities, South Asian textiles, new voices turning the city into what it is.

A city of movement, not the fantasy of purity.

In the end, this controversy says less about immigration than about the anxieties and incentives of modern culture war. An endless national shouting match in which even billionaires abroad can grasp at relevance by warning from a distance of decline.

Burgess once reminded us that “language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”

That, perhaps, is the deeper city beat. Not a story of threat, but the restless, unfinished work of belonging itself.

Manchester, of all places, knows that nothing stays “pure” for long.

And somewhere beneath all this, the Manchester beat goes on—stubborn, unresolved—a reminder that identity is always in motion, and that the stories we tell about belonging are not always innocent.

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