The grim hypocrisy of Sir Jim Ratcliffe ...Middle East

From his tax haven in Monaco, you could forgive Sir Jim Ratcliffe for struggling to keep one finger on the pulse back in Manchester.

The mask slipped long ago for the local Manc done good who became a billionaire, union-smasher and co-owner of one of the world’s biggest football clubs. He has long flirted with the politics of Nigel Farage but now has gone a step further, telling Sky News that immigrants have “colonised” the UK.

Much like the £2bn new stadium he has spent a year pleading with the Government to part-fund, Ratcliffe opines that migrants are “costing too much money”.

“You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in,” he said.

“I mean, the UK has been colonised. It’s costing too much money. “The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.”

Among the other mesmerising insights of Ratcliffe, an ardent supporter of Brexit – estimated to have left a black hole of £100bn a year – was that “I don’t think the economy is in a good state”. Said without irony, presumably.

It takes some doing to make the Glazer clan look like bona fide men of the people. The appeal of the Ineos takeover lay in an end to the American regime, salvation lying in the form of a petrochemical behemoth from Failsworth in the Borough of Oldham. This boyhood Manchester United devotee would only ever have the club’s best interests at heart.

The logic started to wear a little thin as the cuts rolled in, hundreds of ordinary staff laid off. Then again, for those who had been paying attention at Grangemouth, Ineos’ petro-hub in Scotland, that was little surprise.

When Unite members threatened to strike over pay, conditions and job security, Ratcliffe threatened to shut the plant. Though no strike actually took place, he announced a non-negotiable package and forced his workers to capitulate.

The Ineos arm now stretches into the heart of Manchester, or Cottonopolis as it was once known, famed for its role in developing co-operatives, women’s suffrage and the horrors of Peterloo where protesting workers were massacred in 1819.

As well as the home of United, it is a city rich in immigration whose mills inspired Friedrich Engels to write The Condition of the Working Class in England, a heritage coming under strain in the by-election at Gorton and Denton, where Reform currently lead the polls.

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For Ratcliffe, that is no bad thing. He hails Farage as an “intelligent man” with “good intentions”. Sir Keir Starmer, he suggested, is “maybe too nice” – “I don’t know whether it’s just the apparatus that hasn’t allowed Keir to do it”.

The Prime Minister condemned his comments about immigrants as “offensive and wrong”, calling on Ratcliffe to “apologise”.

At least Farage’s proposed £90bn in tax cuts for the top 10 per cent of earners would help Sir Jim offset some of the £12m it took to pay off Ruben Amorim. Or to soften the fact that under his leadership, United failed to qualify for Europe and slumped to their lowest finish in Premier League history.

Whatever United’s standing on the pitch, criticising immigrants while living in the principality is grim hypocrisy. 

Plenty to take in from the bow of a Monaco yacht.

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