Last week, Manchester United co-owner and billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe sparked condemnation from government and various parts of civil society after saying that the UK had been “colonised by immigrants”.
In the coming days, he will discover if the Football Association’s legal team has decided that he brought the game of football into disrepute with his comments, with Ratcliffe also citing incorrect population data during his interview with Sky News.
There is no doubt that Ratcliffe used unnecessarily inflammatory and loaded language. He has since apologised for the fact that his choice of language had offended some people, but did underscore the importance of raising the issue of well-controlled immigration, which can support economic growth.
In the statement, the Monaco-based businessman said that he intended to stress that “governments must manage migration alongside investment in skills, industry and jobs so that long-term prosperity is shared by everyone” and that “we must maintain an open debate on the challenges facing the UK”.
In this sense, Ratcliffe is correct. The UK needs to be rehabilitated from the political establishment’s long-term addiction to mass immigration, which has been used – in vain – to engineer economic growth and mask over a domestic worklessness crisis.
The truth is that the UK remains wedded to a low-growth, high-immigration, sluggish-productivity model – and many of Britain’s young people, from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds, are paying a hefty price.
In July to September 2025, an estimated 12.7 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 years in the UK were not in education, employment or training (NEET) – a total of 946,000 young people. In the last few days, it was revealed that the UK’s youth unemployment rate exceeded the EU’s for the first time, with a Bank of England official blaming minimum wage increases for pricing young people out of work.
To make matters worse, today it has been revealed that the overall unemployment rate in the UK hit a near five-year high in the last three months of 2025, climbing to 5.2 per cent (reaching 14 per cent for 18-to-24-year-olds).
While Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves sought to woo business ahead of the July 2024 UK general election, a variety of tax-raising measures, increases in the minimum wage, and the ongoing net-zero project have collectively created a hostile environment for firms and companies in the private sector.
Getty Images
In addition to this, the current government has simply not been ambitious enough in terms of seeking to reduce the UK’s over-reliance on immigration by enhancing the domestic talent pool.
Properly funding training schemes, apprenticeships, and bursaries for sectors such as health and social care – accessible to British people of all races and classes – would be a step in the right direction in terms of cutting down the UK’s immigration hyper-dependency.
This, of course, should be complemented with welfare and tax reforms, which ultimately incentivise labour market participation.
Ratcliffe deserved to be condemned for the reckless language he used when referring to immigration. But to completely ignore his intervention would be a grave error, and it is vital that the UK works towards a strategy of national self-sufficiency – to solve its many social and economic problems, it must look within.