The Coloniser Who Cried “Colonised”
Jim Ratcliffe fled Britain to avoid paying tax, laid off hundreds and imports cheap foreign gas. Now he wants to lecture us about immigrants.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s interview on Sky News this morning has caused quite a stir, in which the billionaire chemical magnate, Monaco resident, and part-owner of a football club he is slowly destroying, decided to share his thoughts on immigration.
“The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn’t it?” he said, presumably without a trace of irony.1
Colonised. A word with very specific historical weight, used by a man whose entire fortune is built on a petrochemical empire that operates across 29 countries, employs 26,000 people from God knows how many nationalities, and whose business model has historically relied on extracting resources, suppressing workers, and moving money offshore faster than United fans can say “Sack the board”.
If anyone knows about colonising, Jim, it’s you.
The man who can’t count
Before we get into the hypocrisy; let’s start with the basics. Ratcliffe told Sky News that the UK population was 58 million in 2020 and is now 70 million. That’s a claim of 12 million extra people in six years.
The ONS, the actual people whose job it is to count, puts the UK population at 67.1 million in mid-2020 and approximately 69.5 million now.2 That’s an increase of about 2.4 million, not 12 million. Jim was out by nearly 10 million people. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a fabrication.
Let’s hope Jim isn’t using this same margin of error when formulating his chemicals, the whole plant might explode. Actually, given INEOS’s environmental record, maybe they already have.
But accuracy has never been the point with this kind of rhetoric. The point is the feeling, the mood music, the dog whistle. Say the word “colonised”, let the audience do the rest. Farage does it, Ratcliffe does it, and the media laps it up.
Those who will use these words to racially abuse someone on a bus care very little about the accuracy or context, they need an excuse to act like they do. Jim just gave them one.
Cheap imports for me, not for thee
During the interview Ratcliffe began by bemoaning the state of his chemical business. His Cologne plant, he lamented, costs him €100 million a year in carbon taxes. The European chemical industry cannot continue like this, he warned. Cheap imports from countries like China, countries that don’t respect the environment, will flood the market.
Jim Ratcliffe, the man who between 2014 and 2017 racked up 176 environmental permit violations at his Middlesbrough plant alone, half of which were for exceeding air and water pollution limits,3 is worried about other countries not respecting the environment.
This is the same INEOS that in 2018 threatened to close a plant rather than comply with EU pollution rules and asked the UK government to defer compliance on its behalf.4 The same INEOS that was found guilty of releasing caustic soda into the Manchester Ship Canal in 2016.5 The same INEOS whose operations in Sarnia, Ontario were suspended in 2024 for excessive benzene emissions.6
But sure, Jim, it’s the Chinese we need to worry about.
He then pivoted to demanding tariffs. Europe needs protection, he said. Anti-dumping duties take two years to implement in Europe but only six months in America. Europe needs to be more like America. Fair enough, on the surface.
INEOS’s Grangemouth refinery, the one Ratcliffe received £120 million in UK government grants to support,7 imports shale gas from the United States. He spent $2 billion building special ships called Dragons specifically to transport cheap American ethane across the Atlantic to Scotland.8 He even bragged about it, saying the cheap imports help make the plant viable.
So let me get this straight. Cheap imports that feed Jim’s profits? Great, build ships for them.
Cheap imports that compete with Jim’s products? Outrageous, build tariff walls.
Human beings who come to Britain, trying to escape its foreign policy and global economic slavery. Colonisers. Get them out.
The Manchester United management school of government
Having sorted out European trade policy from his sun lounger, Ratcliffe then moved on to running the country. His comparison? Manchester United.
“I’ve been very unpopular at Manchester United because we’ve made lots of changes. But for the better, in my view.”
Since taking control of football operations at United, Ratcliffe has sacked approximately 250 staff in 2024, followed by another 150 to 200 in early 2025.9 Many of these were long-serving employees, people who had worked at the club for decades. He axed free staff lunches. He raised ticket prices mid-season while fans were already struggling. He compared this to the tough love the country needs.
And then, without missing a beat, he said the country’s problem was “people opting to take benefits rather than working for a living.”
A man who has just put hundreds of people out of work, people who were working for a living, some of them for 20 or 30 years, is now complaining about people being on benefits. Where exactly does he think those sacked United employees ended up?
The £4 billion vanishing act
In September 2020, Jim Ratcliffe moved his personal tax residence from Hampshire to Monaco. The estimated tax saving? £4 billion.10 Four. Billion. Pounds. To put that in perspective, the entire NHS funding deficit for 2025 is £2.2 billion. One man’s tax dodge could have funded the NHS shortfall nearly twice over.
But it gets better. In 2010, he moved INEOS’s headquarters to Switzerland, cutting the company’s UK tax bill by approximately £100 million per year.11 Then in 2015, with great fanfare, he announced INEOS was “coming home” to Britain, setting up a shiny new HQ in Knightsbridge.
By 2017, just two years later, he was quietly scouting properties in Monaco.12 When the Daily Express asked him directly in May 2019 whether he lived in Monaco, he said no. Yet months earlier, in filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, he had listed his principal address as Monaco.
Since 2016, INEOS has paid only approximately £67 million per year in UK tax, while moving hundreds of millions offshore.13 Meanwhile, the company has received over £1.07 billion in government support since 2014, including £600 million for a plastics plant in Belgium and that £120 million grant after closing Grangemouth.
In 2020, fresh off his move to Monaco, he had the audacity to seek a £500 million government covid bailout for Grangemouth.14 He moved to Monaco to save billions, then asked British taxpayers to rescue his Scottish refinery. And then, and then, he closed the refinery anyway in 2024, costing 400 jobs.
If you needed a metaphor for Ratcliffe’s entire operation, look no further than the INEOS Grenadier. His £75,000 vanity project, supposedly built for serious adventurers, accelerates with all the urgency of a man walking to a job centre .
The Grenadier was supposed to be built in Wales, creating 500 British jobs. Instead, production was moved to Hambach, France.
The real numbers on immigration
According to DWP statistics from June 2025, 83.6% of Universal Credit claimants are British or Irish nationals. Of the 16.4% born overseas, 50% of EU nationals claiming Universal Credit are actually in employment.15
A 2016 analysis found that foreign-born residents made up 17.6% of the working-age population but only 7.4% of out-of-work benefit claimants. They were under-represented among those claiming benefits, not over-represented.
EU immigrants between 2001 and 2011 paid £15 billion more in taxes than they received in benefits.16 Immigrants are more likely to be educated, 44% have higher education compared to 23% of UK-born residents, younger, and more likely to be in employment.17
The biggest group of benefit recipients in the UK? White British pensioners claiming State Pension.18 But I suspect that doesn’t quite fit the narrative Jim was going for.
Colonised by whom?
Ratcliffe used the word “colonised”, a word that carries the weight of centuries of exploitation, extraction, and subjugation. A word that means having your resources stripped, your labour exploited, your autonomy removed, and your future decided by people who don’t live among you and don’t share in the consequences.
By that definition, the people colonising Britain aren’t arriving on dinghies across the Channel. They’re flying in by private jet from Monaco, extracting billions in government subsidies, paying as little tax as legally possible, closing down factories, sacking workers, moving production overseas, polluting communities, and then appearing on Sky News to blame the whole mess on immigrants.
Jim Ratcliffe hasn’t just colonised the discourse. He’s colonised the treasury, colonised Grangemouth and colonised Manchester United.
The Prime Minister called his comments “offensive and wrong” and demanded an apology. Justice Minister Jake Richards put it more bluntly: “Offensive that this man who moved to Monaco to save £4 billion in tax is now lecturing us about immigration.”
Not sure why they are so worked up about this whole thing. They whistle and the dog barks. The government has been pushing the same narrative for months now under Shabana Mahmood and her policies, dragging immigration timescales out to decades and wrapping racist narratives in brown skin to make them palatable.
Starmer’s outrage at Ratcliffe is the that of a man who hears his own argument said out loud without the PR polish. This isn’t a clash of values. This is trickle down racism, from Keir, to Jim, down to the masses. The only difference is Jim said the quiet part out loud.
Jim needs to get a reality check, Britain is broken, millions struggle to make ends meet, easy to blame immigrants when you a Billionaire living off government handouts and tax dodges.
For the rest of us it’s life Jim but not as you know it.
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References
Sky News interview with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, 11 February 2026. https://news.sky.com/story/uk-has-been-colonised-by-immigrants-says-ineos-boss-and-man-utd-co-owner-sir-jim-ratcliffe
ONS, Population estimates for the UK, mid-2020 to mid-2024. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates
Unearthed/Greenpeace investigation, INEOS Middlesbrough permit violations 2014-2017. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/04/19/ineos-pollution-record-middlesbrough/
Unearthed/Greenpeace, INEOS threatened plant closure over EU pollution rules, 2018. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/04/19/ineos-pollution-record-middlesbrough/
Environment Agency prosecution, INEOS found guilty of releasing caustic soda into Manchester Ship Canal, 2016. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chemical-company-fined-for-polluting-manchester-ship-canal
Ontario Ministry of Environment suspends INEOS Sarnia operations over benzene emissions, May 2024. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ineos-sarnia-benzene-shutdown-1.7215632
UK Government grant of £120 million to INEOS following Grangemouth refinery closure; total government support exceeding £1.07 billion since 2014. https://www.ft.com/content/ineos-grangemouth-government-grant
INEOS invested $2 billion in Dragon ships to import US shale gas ethane to Grangemouth. https://www.ineos.com/inch-magazine/articles/issue-18/shale-gas/
Manchester United staff redundancies: ~250 in 2024, 150-200 in early 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/manchester-united-redundancies
Ratcliffe moved tax residence to Monaco, September 2020, estimated £4 billion personal tax saving. The Times, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/20/sir-jim-ratcliffe-moves-to-monaco-ineos
INEOS moved HQ to Switzerland in 2010, saving approximately £100 million per year in corporation tax. https://www.ft.com/content/ineos-switzerland-tax
Ratcliffe told the Daily Express (May 2019) he did not live in Monaco, while SEC filings listed his principal address as Monaco; had been scouting Monaco properties since 2017. The Times, Tax Watch UK. https://www.taxwatchuk.org/ineos-jim-ratcliffe-tax/
INEOS UK tax payments averaging approximately £67 million per year since 2016. Tax Watch UK. https://www.taxwatchuk.org/ineos-jim-ratcliffe-tax/
Do not give Ineos £500m Covid bail-out, say campaigners
https://www.theferret.scot/ineos-500-million-bail-out-campaigners/
DWP, Universal Credit Statistics, 29 April 2013 to 12 June 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-12-june-2025
DWP, Universal Credit Statistics, 29 April 2013 to 12 June 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-12-june-2025
House of Commons Library, Statistics on Migrants and Benefits, Research Briefing CBP-7445. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7445/
GOV.UK Ethnicity Facts and Figures, State Support by Ethnicity. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/benefits/state-support/latest
When and why was Ratcliffe made a ‘sir?’ This government consistently supports the ‘elites’ - supporting and giving this one billions of pounds. It’s just typical that the likes of him come before the NHS etc.