Blaming migrants for the UK’s ills is wrong, offensive, lazy

If Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire businessman and co-owner of Manchester United, had only followed the wise advice of Irish missionary Amy Carmichael that “Let nothing be said about anyone unless it passes through the three sieves: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?” he would have saved us all from his bigoted, ill-informed rant on the UK being colonized by immigrants. He could also have saved himself from the justified criticism by a broad segment of British society, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who immediately labelled Ratcliffe’s comments as “offensive and wrong,” and called on him to apologize.

The controversy followed a TV interview in which Ratcliffe said: “You can’t afford … you can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in.” He then added: “The UK is being colonized by immigrants, really, isn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.” In a relatively short passage of about 30 seconds, he managed to skip Carmichael’s three criteria by being factually wrong, offensive, and to what end?

To begin with, associating migrants with living on benefits, which translates in the mind of the right-wing anti-migrant groups in the UK into draining the public coffers, is false. Putting the two together in one sentence is taken from the hymn sheet of the most extreme xenophobes in British society, which is bound to dangerously sow more seeds of friction and discord. It is also not true that 12 million people have arrived since 2020. More accurate figures show that in that year, 66.7 million people lived in the UK, and the country’s population was last estimated at 58 million in 1995. In this case, it took three decades for that increase, not five years. It is correct that, since the beginning of the century, migration has been a bigger contributor to population growth than the UK birthrate most years, but without it, there is a good chance the economy would have suffered a decline, in addition to missing out on the other benefits of the UK becoming multicultural.

Nevertheless, it was the use of the emotively loaded word “colonized” that attracted, and with great justification, most ire. This is a case of lumping together all those who come to the UK with the intention of taking it over, changing its character dramatically, and then controlling it. Where is the evidence for that? One could have given Ratcliffe the benefit of the doubt that this was a regrettable slip of the tongue, if he had retracted his comments. At the end of the day, a choice of the wrong words, especially in front of a microphone or a camera, is not unheard of. However, despite the storm that his interview caused, the best he could offer to calm it down was to say “sorry that my choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe and caused concern,” without retraction, only adding the importance of raising the issue “of controlled and well-managed immigration that supports economic growth.” An obvious statement, as almost everything in life needs to be managed. However, what he did was effectively a dog whistle, in portraying migrants as unwelcome colonizers.

It is an outright rejection of multicultural Britain

Yossi Mekelberg

This kind of language only adds to the jingoistic terms used by right-wing politicians, journalists, and activists who talk about “invasion,” or placards seen in protests against migrants that call to “protect women and our kids,” suggesting that immigrants are prone to attack women and children. Moreover, remarks such as those by Tory MPs that new immigrants will cost the Treasury “hundreds of billions of pounds” if they stay in the UK, or that “migrants are draining our welfare system” create an environment that singles out migrants as a burden on our society. Even Labour has subscribed to this rhetoric, with the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood saying that fiscal contribution is “a condition of staying in the UK.” If these politicians had bothered to look at the facts, they would have realized that migrants in the UK made tax contributions of around £20 billion and that the average income of a migrant is higher than that of a native-born person aged 16-64. Moreover, labor force participation among non-UK citizens is higher than among British citizens. This is hardly surprising, considering that most migrants are blocked from accessing public benefits and, in many cases, their visas require employment.

But the irony — or, more accurately, the audacity — is that Ratcliffe criticizes those who do not pay taxes and do not contribute to the economy and society. At the same time, several years ago, he moved his residence, accompanied by his fortune, to the comfortable tax haven of Monaco, something that apparently saved him the modest sum of $4 billion. Ratcliffe, like some other British “patriots” who supported Brexit but migrated, including to Europe, mainly for tax reasons, did not follow the advice that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Evoking the emotive theme of being colonized is not about raising legitimate concerns about, for instance, the smuggling of people by criminal gangs, or what the economic implications are of a growing population, not even how immigration affects intercommunal relations and public services; it is an outright rejection of the other and of multicultural Britain. It is a contemporary version of the island mentality. Bizarrely, this view is held not only by people whose engagement with the world has been limited. Ratcliffe exemplifies someone who is a major beneficiary of a globalized world in which people can move from place to place, and their origins, religion and ethnicity are celebrated and not used against them. Unless, of course, he believes that this privilege of social and economic mobility should only be the privilege of the wealthiest on this planet, like him.

Immigration brings great benefits and challenges, including how best to achieve integration and inclusiveness while embracing diversity as part of British identity shared by all. What we see in times of economic hardship is the scapegoating of newcomers for what goes wrong in the economy and society, accompanied by the innuendo suggesting those who look and sound different are colonizers. This is factually wrong, intellectually lazy, and above all suggests deep-seated racism that benefits no one.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg