Has racism been normalised in the immigration debate?

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1:03This is a Global Player original podcast. He's a nice, I mean, I know Keir, he's a nice man, I like him. But it's a tough job and I think you have to do some difficult things with the UK to get it back on track because at the moment I don't think the economy's in a good, you can't afford, You can't have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK is being colonised. It's costing too much money. It will cause... It'll be colonised. It'll cause... The UK is being colonised by immigrants, really, isn't it? That is Jim Ratcliffe. He is the face of the Manchester United Board, describing the UK as colonised.

1:49Is he wrong? Is he racist or is he just deeply out of his depth?

1:55Lewis Goodall:This follows a trend that we've seen from those at the top of politics and beyond. To use language and terms and ideas that were once the preserve of the far right and the way that they spoke about immigration. Is that now, in 2026, the new normal? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:20Lewis Goodall:The News Agents. It's Lewis. It's Emily. And as Emily was saying, this is Sir Jim Ratcliffe. He's a British billionaire industrialist, funnily enough, resident in Monaco, an immigrant there, founder of the chemicals giant INEOS and a minority owner, major control over Manchester United. He, as you heard there with Sky News, Ed Conway, talking about how he thinks Britain economically is going wrong. And part of the story of that is that Britain has been colonised by immigrants, linking high levels of immigration to social and economic strain. As I was saying there, we can talk about it a bit more.

2:59Lewis Goodall:The language of colonisation used to be the preserve of the far right when talking about immigration. It seems to have become more and more normal, just tripping off the tongue there. of Sir Jim in a rather casual way. It has this morning, as you might imagine, or this afternoon, sparks some outrage and condemnation. The Prime Minister's Keir Starmer has condemned it as offensive and wrong. We've also heard Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, say this. These comments go against everything for which Manchester has traditionally stood, a place where people of all races, faiths and none, have pulled together over centuries to build our city and our institutions, including Manchester United FC.

3:36Lewis Goodall:Calling for curbs on levels of immigration is one thing, Portraying those who come here as a hostile invading force is quite another. It is inaccurate, insulting, inflammatory and should be withdrawn. So Jim has clarified or issued a sort of apology this afternoon, saying that he was sorry if some people were offended by it. Yeah, Jim Ratcliffe, for context, is not just a billionaire, but reckoned to be Britain's seventh richest man. But that didn't stop him in 2020 moving to a place where he could avoid paying. It's estimated by the Justice Minister around four billion pounds of tax to the UK government.

4:18Obviously, a much lower rate of tax from Monaco. Not too much then. No. So he made a few savings being a Monaco resident before he started entering the immigration debate. Did he colonise Monaco, do you think? It's a very good question, isn't it? Because I think to step back for one minute to talk about immigration in numbers, which was how we kind of traditionally used to do it. We used to say, you know, this is what's happened. This has been the change. I mean, ironically, we could very well end up in a place where net migration is round about zero by the summer. But put that to one side for a moment.

4:55We have talked about immigration being high in numbers terms. but to say colonise is the bit that really sticks in the crawl. Not only is it, as you were referencing, a right-wing trope that suggests somehow that puppet masters are redesigning the sort of native population of Britain to make it look like it's full of people that just pushed their way in here but it's also a failure to recognise that colonialism began with this country and the size of our colony. They are here because we were there.

5:34Lewis Goodall:Well, these people always tell us that colonialism wasn't such a bad thing. Right. It's okay when we do it. It turns out it's fine. It's fine. It's terrible. Just make your mind up. But as anyone who's written or researched or looked at the whole construct and ideas around colonialism, Satnam Sangara, not least, I mean, he's written Empire Land. an extraordinary book about exactly this subject. They are here because we were there. We went out. We had the biggest empire in the world. And so actually to then turn around and say, what are you all doing here? It's kind of crazy. The irony is, just briefly, the irony is, if they read that book, they would be reminded that the irony is, they all tell us we should be much prouder of the British Empire.

6:15Lewis Goodall:The British Empire was the biggest freedom of movement block that has ever existed. At one point, you know, about 750 million people had the right to come and work and live in the UK. Yeah. So here he is. And instead of talking about it in a numbers term, he's using this, I think we can say, very strongly racial language. And one of the questions before we came on air was, frankly, with our own team and our editors trying to work out whether we were shocked by this or not. and part of me thinks actually I wasn't shocked. This has sort of become normalised language now, normalised for billionaires, not all billionaires I should add, normalised for people who are sort of looking to farage perhaps and reform to reshape the country.

7:04But I do think, I mean, one of the loveliest ironies of this is that he's obviously, as I said, the face of Man United football team, which not only has an incredibly diverse fan base in Manchester, and further afield, an incredibly diverse player base, but is also one of the founders of Kick It Out, you know, this whole anti-racism charity and campaign to kick racism out of football. And here you have a guy who's making his millions or spending his billions on an English football team who is importing, let's say, racism right to the heart of it again.

7:41Lewis Goodall:And you're right, we had that discussion because, yeah, Yeah, frankly, the use of this sort of language, particularly from the radical right of politics, reform, that has become commonplace. But I think it is important that we kind of market and talk about it, particularly when it's coming out of the mouth of. And as I say, quite casually, I think, you know, just sort of tripping off the tongue of, you know, such a senior British businessman and such an influential person. Because I do think it does tell you something about how widespread and normalized that language and idea has become. And we've seen this as part of a pattern.

8:16Lewis Goodall:Let's just think about politics over the last five years or so. We've had a Home Secretary, Sir Le Braverman at the time, now in reform, talk about an invasion of our southern coast. We've had Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister's ethnicity as an Englishman, even as a Briton, questioned because of his race. We've also had a former Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary, now in reform, Robert Jennerick, talking about going to Birmingham and it being a mark of a lack of integration and a form of displeasure not to be able to count a single white face you know this has a cumulative toll and it does move as we talk as you say you know the Overton window does shift on what sort of language is normal and just to focus a little bit on why I think colonization is a really really problematic term it absolutely feeds into a long established trope of the far right which is the idea that it isn't just people who we're inviting in because that is ultimately what legal immigration at least which is the vast majority of immigration is we are whether we should or not we are inviting people and asking people and allowing people legally to come and do jobs in the uk or study in the UK or live in the UK or whatever it happens to be.

9:32Lewis Goodall:That is an act of power and agency. This idea from the far right that actually what is going on is either an invasion or a colonisation removes that agency. It removes that power. It suggests that immigration is something that is being done unto us, to us, rather than something that we are elected to do. It suggests that a foreign power is taking and control and settling in Britain and dominating, displacing or exploiting the indigenous population and imposing their culture and language on us. And there is someone for whom those ideas are absolutely synonymous. And it is Enoch Powell. That is exactly what Enoch Powell was writing and talking about in 1968 in his Rivers of Blood speech, which of course is so infamous within British politics.

10:20Lewis Goodall:And those ideas which got Enoch Powell chucked out of the Conservative Party at that time are now, I would argue, pretty central to at least a core part of our politics, certainly on the right. And as we see from Jim Ratcliffe there, are becoming, I think, normalised within certainly elite parts of British society and elsewhere. Well, let's hear what Nigel Farage had to say when he was asked about them this morning. So Jim Ratcliffe, one of the richest Britons in the world, of course, the boss of INEOS, and now a major shareholder in Manchester United Football Club, has caused outrage by his comments.

10:51So what's he actually said? Well he said that our population has gone up from 58 million to 70 million and that with 9 million people of working age on benefits, we don't need mass migration. He said much of the country had been colonised by immigrants. Now that word was a controversial word and he said, OK, if you don't like the word, we'll tone it down. But just think about this. You ask yourself why public services have diminished. You ask yourself why rents have gone through the roof. The population explosion has done that. And then you look at parts of London, for example, where the road names, the underground signs, aren't just in English, they're in a foreign language as well.

11:34One million people living in this country don't speak any English at all. Four million people living in this country barely speak passable English. And that's the point that he was making, that big areas of our towns and cities have been changed into something completely different to what they were, and that it's all making us poorer. And I don't really care if number 10 is in uproar, or if much of mainstream media find his comments too difficult. I believe firmly that Jim Ratcliffe is right. Well, to coin a phrase, I think Nigel Farage has there just colonised a lot of what he thinks Jim Ratcliffe was saying because he's invented a lot of context which was never spelled out in the interview.

12:19But critically, I think, Nigel Farage did not repeat that phrase, colonised. He turned it into something that he wanted to talk about instead. Jim Ratcliffe's own figures are wrong. I mean, let's just get that out. The Office for National Statistics, which I have to say, a lot of people are now checking and quoting. So if the worst that comes of this actually is that more people know the true stats rather than the Jim Ratcliffe stats, then that's not a bad thing. The Office of National Statistics, the ONS, estimates that the population was 67 million in 2020, not 58. In other words, it has crept up by about two.

12:59We're now at about 69 just south, just below 70. So there has been an increase. Nobody's denying that.

13:07Lewis Goodall:We had a lot of immigration around that time. That's undoubtedly true. We can see the immigration figures, but it's not a correct number that he's using. And the fact that Farage sort of commandeered what someone else had said, didn't then use that phrase colonised because he recognises, even Farage recognises that it is controversial, but turned it into something which is like the sort of, I don't know, I'm going to say the every man's understanding of what's wrong with this country, which is the signs are in a different language. Really? Does that offend you? Do you hate signs in a different language?

13:42I have to say, I think there's, in terms of the London Underground Network, we think there's one sign, right? Whitechapel famously in another. I mean, I don't know how sort of small your life is that you have to be really, really angry about one sign having two languages on it.

13:59Lewis Goodall:He's not. We both know he's not. It's complete. No, no, no, no. He couldn't care less. But to the point, I guess now, which is that we've stopped talking about numbers and that seems to me relevant. Or at least we stopped talking about the correct numbers. We're still using the wrong numbers. We've stopped talking about numbers because somehow it is easier to make this case that our economy has sunk because of the colour of the people, because of the quality of the people, because of the culture of the people. Now, has Jim Ratcliffe got a point about our terrible economy? He has. You know, the figures came out this morning showing that we have barely grown.

14:39We've had, I think, 0.1 % in the last quarter, 1.3 % overall. Our economy is barely grown. It is the simplest thing in the world to blame immigrants for the fact that our economy is sinking. And there are so many other areas you can start to look, Not least the failure to actually secure anything after Brexit that helped us make up for the 4 % loss to GDP that that decision has cost us. We could go on. I can go on. But it just seems to me so simple to turn around and say immigrants are costing you your jobs. And we know even economically, take the culture away from it, economically, that is not true.

15:19Lewis Goodall:As ever with these things, it's a deeply reductive, simplistic take. I mean, for example, you know, we want to build more houses. We know for a fact we don't have sufficient skills in the country right now to build the houses that we want, where we're going to get them, we'll have to get them from abroad. That creates some jobs, maybe it takes away from others. It's a complicated picture that we rarely have that discussion, something we've talked about before. I think it is absolutely worth dwelling, exactly as you said, Emily, on the question of moving from numbers to culture. Because numbers is, of course, you know, first one to recognise and say, over the last few years, we always talk about the boats, but just thinking about legal migration, certainly the end of the last decade, start of this decade, we had very high immigration numbers, historically high.

16:00Lewis Goodall:You know, at one point, net migration, you're nudging up to a million in a year. I think it is entirely legitimate and right that people question that, query that, ask questions of the government at the time, of course, with the Conservative government at the time, and real questions about the capacity for Britain to absorb that rate of churn and change. And it is also true to say that it's perfectly legitimate as well to have a conversation about integration and about whether some cultures or some people from certain countries are much worse at integrating than others and having that conversation.

16:30Lewis Goodall:I don't think liberals or progressives or anything should be afraid of that conversation. It's perfectly, perfectly proper conversation to have. And if you don't have it, you leave it to the right and the far right. That said, this obsession, which is a far right idea, which is that in a way, the numbers don't matter. What matters is that there are some people who will never be assimilated, whose cultures will always be, those people will always be incompatible with our own. That takes you down a different route. And this focus on this question of colonisation or invasion or whatever you happen to be, the reason it is damaging and the reason I think all mainstream politicians, including on the centre-right, should fight it is because it plays into some very dark impulses, which is immigrants aren't coming to join us, they're coming to replace us, and they're not coming to add to our society or even change our society slightly they are coming to erase our society and that is something that we are seeing a conversation we're seeing at the very top of politics on the radical right including from the united states and from maga who themselves in their own national security strategy have talked about the idea of europe facing civilizational erasure so this is all part of a much bigger picture of the politics of the medical radical right and how they perceive what are, whether they like it or not, objectively, our ethnically diverse 21st century societies.

17:52And that's why, I guess, to go back to the very first question I asked on this episode, my sense is that Ratcliffe is more than anything just out of his depth on this.

18:03Lewis Goodall:I think he's a symptom of what we're talking about rather than someone who's necessarily that. Yeah, what I would say is you're completely right. The numbers question is one we have the whole time. The integration question is a conversation we have the whole time. But it's almost as if he has heard the kind of words like colonisation in the ether and just sort of assume that that is now normal. And the question that we're really asking, I guess, is, is that because it is normal, because these are part of a conversation that no longer stops people in their track and says, actually, don't fall for this.

18:38Lewis Goodall:I think algorithmically, for certain parts of our life, it is very normal. These conversations are everywhere. This sort of this audio, if you like, the audio tape of those kind of words is everywhere now. And I think politically, what this has done at the end of a very tumultuous week, actually, is given Keir Starmer, bizarrely, a lifeline. It is an absolute life belt that he has been thrown to bring a very fractured party together. Now, I have to say, that is not, I'm sure, the primary reason that he came straight out the traps and condemned the remarks of Jim Ratcliffe. But when you have been facing down your party, when you have been facing down a Scottish Labour leader who actually called for you to go, whether you have women in your party thinking that you're running essentially a Labour boys club or a Downing Street boys club, To be able suddenly to find the one place on which the entire party will be cohesive, I think will have been something of relief for Keir Starmer, for the prime minister.

19:43And we're always talking about the fact that you don't often see that much sort of decisiveness. You don't you don't see that much ideology from the PM. You don't see that much instant response. This is somewhere where he absolutely knew what he wanted to say very definitively, very clearly, very directly. he's managed to put what he thinks is racist language back in its place and in so doing enter parliamentary recess on a note that everyone in the Labour Party will agree on.

20:10Lewis Goodall:This is I think the challenge for more mainstream political forces on the centre-left and centre-right in terms of this endless debate. I mean you and I have talked about this show endlessly at politicians over the years endlessly which is how do you calibrate it that you are both addressing people's concerns and talking about it whilst not doing so in a way that potentially makes the problem worse. And that is a difficult thing to calibrate. I'm certainly not one of those people who think the best thing you can do is just sort of not talk about this at all and just say, actually, it's about totally other questions.

20:40Lewis Goodall:It's about the economy. It's about whatever. I don't think that's right. I think that mainstream forces have to address these cultural questions. But I think the way you do it is precisely by drawing lines in the sand. And you can absolutely be vehement about questions like this when it comes to... It's perfectly fine to have these conversations. When it comes to talking about colonisation, talking about invasion, talking about some of the themes we heard Farage there, there is a real space, I think, an opportunity for politicians like Starmer and other mainstream politicians to appeal to what I think is actually the mainstream common sense position of most of the British public, which is that they certainly want this to be controlled.

21:15Lewis Goodall:they're unhappy with some of the numbers that we've seen in recent years but i think that most people are not in that conspiratorial place yet when we're really talking about colonialism or reverse colonialism or whatever and as you say emily in a way and i think this is a challenge for farage and another reason why they're not going to be talking about the numbers so much and focusing on the cultural questions is as you say net migration is coming down and it's forecast to come down substantially by the end of the parliament who knows as you say it could be at sort of net zero. So then suddenly, where's their song to sing?

21:45Lewis Goodall:Because they can't talk about massive numbers anymore. So they have to start talking about the people who are already here and the idea that we've already been colonised and start talking about re-immigration or whatever. That's why they're starting to talk like this. Yeah, and I have a hunch that more British people would say, I prefer people in this country, be they immigrants or not, who come and pay their taxes rather than billionaires who bugger off to Monaco and don't. But he's an expat, you see. He's not a migrant. He's an expat. It's very, very different. Very, very different. Very different.

22:16Lewis Goodall:We'll be back just after this.

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23:26Lewis Goodall:The News Agents. So there has been so much news and the pace has been so fast with the Mandelson affair that one story that actually is a really big story has basically slipped down the headlines a little bit but I think it's about to make a bit of a comeback and that is the role of the cabinet secretary and the cabinet secretary is the most senior civil service in the country they lead the civil service they're one of the chief aides of the prime minister they're basically the guy it always has been a man so far might be about to change basically the man the prime minister turns to to try and get his agenda through the civil service and kind of the machinery of government it's the person the prime minister meets when the newly elected prime minister goes through the front door of number 10.