Manchester United co-owner and billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe has apologised for “offending some people” with his choice of words after saying the UK had been “colonised by immigrants”.
Sparking outrage, condemnation of Ratcliffe’s remarks included Manchester United fans. Protest organisation “The ’58” labelled Ratcliffe ‘a total embarrassment’.
Meanwhile, the Manchester United Muslim Supporters’ Club expressed concerns that those threatening minority communities could feel more empowered, with Ratcliffe risking “legitimising prejudice and deepening division”.
While I agree with those who believe that Ratcliffe’s language was inflammatory and that he should have taken far more care when he incorrectly stated that the UK’s population had risen by twelve million people since 2020 (it has done so since the turn of the century), he received his fair share of support on mainstream radio shows as well as the comment sections of multiple national publications.
In this sense, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s response to Ratcliffe’s comments may not have necessarily landed as hoped, saying that they were “offensive and wrong” and that “Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse country”.
One can both believe that Ratcliffe’s wording was distasteful but have perfectly legitimate concerns over the degree of cultural and demographic change because of the unprecedented levels of immigration the UK has experienced in recent years.
Indeed, this was the thrust of the ‘Island of Strangers” speech Starmer himself delivered back in May 2025.
In his remarks at the Immigration White Paper press conference, the PM poured scorn on “a one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control”, referring to the need to “close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country”.
In an act of sheer cowardice after being criticised by much of the radical-progressive Left, Starmer distanced himself from his own speech, saying that he deeply regretted using the “island of strangers” phrase.
This act of cowardice is the clearest sign yet that Keir Starmer is now owned by the hard-left - Rakib Ehsan | Getty Images
Starmer is right in the sense that the British people have traditionally been open, tolerant, and generally accepting of diversity, tending to prefer civic over ancestral conceptions of nationhood.
However, astonishing demographic changes fuelled by industrial-scale immigration are understandably testing this openness and tolerance to the limit, especially when it comes to anxieties surrounding integration and identity.
As reported by the Policy Exchange think-tank in its December 2025 paper calling for an emergency census, in the four-year period between June 2021 and June 2025, the UK received an estimated 4.83 million migrants in the form of “long-term international migration” – a truly remarkable figure.
And those who believe the majority are not the brightest and the best can be forgiven for thinking so. The pace and scale of social change in some parts of the country have increased the number of neighbourhoods which have weak associations with British national identity and low levels of English language proficiency.
Pandering to liberal-leftists with ‘progressive’ views on immigration instead of recognising the deep-seated cultural conservatism of Labour’s industrial heartlands will cost Starmer very dearly.
The reality is that the current Labour leader is more detached from the immigration-related concerns of the traditional working classes than a billionaire industrialist based in the tax-haven principality of Monaco. It is yet another spectacular own goal by the PM.