Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s apology: did he mean it?

0:02Niall:Sky News, the full story first.

0:09Niall:One of Britain's richest men has apologised for his language after claiming the UK is being colonised by immigrants. But is Sir Jim Ratcliffe really sorry?

0:22Niall:When one of Britain's richest men does an interview, there will always be people who listen. After all, billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe runs the chemicals giant Ineos and co-owns Manchester United. Still, dry remarks about productivity or the state of British industry don't always get much further than the business sections of most websites. But when Sir Jim sat down with Ed Conway, he blurted out this. The UK's been colonised. It's costing too much money. It will cause... It'll cause... The UK's been colonised by immigrants, really, isn't it? Those comments have been picked up on by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, all the way to Man U Supporters Clubs and the Football Association itself.

1:02Niall:The remarks, well, they've been called offensive, disgraceful, some even say racist. There has been an apology of sorts, but is Jim Ratcliffe truly sorry? And does it matter if he is? Because there are people who think he's right, even if his words were wrong. People who believe this is a conversation the country just isn't having. So Jim was speaking to our economics editor, Ed Conway. I mean, Ed, Jim Radcliffe doesn't do interviews often, but when he does, the headlines that follow, I mean, how did this come about?

1:34Ed Conway:I cover economics, and one of the things that I've been really concerned about in recent years is what's happening to the chemicals sector. So obviously, Jim Radcliffe is probably more famous now as the co-owner of Manchester United. But his big thing, the way he made his billions, is as a chemicals entrepreneur. And he bought up a lot of old chemicals plants around the UK. and in Europe as well. And actually now he is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single, you know, because he owns it, chemicals entrepreneur in Europe. And right now what's happening to the chemicals sector is genuinely scary because of, I guess, kind of higher energy costs and the fact that loads of this stuff is flooding in from China and America.

2:14Ed Conway:We are shutting down chemicals plants at a totally unprecedented rate. And there was this summit happening in Antwerp where basically a lot of the chemicals people were going to the politicians. and so you had Macron and MERS as well from Germany. So you have heads of state there and they are having a meeting with all the chemicals people. So I expected, and I'd been talking to INEOS for a while, they know that I'm interested in this, I think this is really important. And we've been talking about doing an interview with Jim Ratcliffe for a while and finally it was going to happen here in Antwerp and I was excited because, like you say, he doesn't talk that much.

2:47Ed Conway:He's relatively reticent with his public appearances. What is he like when he entered that room for the interview? How did you perceive him? He's pretty gruff. A lot of people in chemicals are like that, OK? You know, it's not about charm. In a lot of industry and in chemicals, it's kind of you're taking one thing, whether it's a kind of metal, whether it's iron ore, and you're turning it into steel. They're not really PR people. They don't necessarily come in the room with a lot of small talk.

3:14Niall:You covered a lot of topics, but unsurprisingly, everyone has focused in on his comments on migration.

3:21Ed Conway:We did talk for like eight minutes or so about chemicals. And so I did think, you know, that was what we were there to talk about. And I think kind of a lot of people, including his colleagues from INEOS, who were there nervously standing on the corner of the room, that's what they thought it was going to be about. So essentially, I asked him about, you know, about the UK economy and about politics and just, you know, everyone knows right now it's tough and it's been tough for a while. And so I just asked his thoughts about that because he has always had some blunt thoughts about politics and about economics.

3:50Ed Conway:And so towards the end of the interview, I thought, well, I should ask him about that. And then he started saying, well, you can't run a country when you've got 9 million people on benefits. That number's not quite right. It's kind of maybe kind of seven or a couple of million lower than that. You can't run a country when, and I don't have the verbatim quote, but when you're being colonised by immigrants. And when he said the word colonised, like I said, I wasn't expecting to be talking about this stuff at all, but I was slightly kind of mouth open.

4:23Niall:Oh, did you sense that the choice of language was deliberate, was conscious, or was this something that slipped out in the moment?

4:30Ed Conway:Well, I asked him, I said colonised, because I couldn't quite believe he used that word. I said colonised, and he said, well, yeah, yeah, we've been colonised by immigrants. He did not choose that word by accident, and he hasn't retracted that word subsequently either.

4:49Niall:Clearly Sir Jim knows one end of a test tube from the other, but I'm not so sure he's hot in the statistics. I mean, he got the numbers wrong as well.

4:56Ed Conway:Look at the population of the UK. It was 58 million in 2020. Now it's up to 70 million. And that number's wrong. It's just completely wrong. It's just completely wrong. I actually thought, so when that was happening, a bit of background on what was going on at the time. We're getting towards, you know, more or less the end of our time, but we still had a few minutes left. And then I asked him this question about politics, and then he said the word colonized, and I said, colonized, are you sure? And he reiterated that. at basically the same point that he is then using that statistic, someone from INEOS is trying to shut down the interview at that point, say, no, no, come on, you've had enough, it's over.

5:36Ed Conway:So that is happening. And, you know, there's, there was a lot going on. And I'm, I'm kind of sitting there slightly flabbergasted about the word colonized. And then he used that statistic. I actually at the time thought he was talking about 2000. Which would have been roughly right. Which would have been roughly right. In 2000, the population was about 58 million. It was kind of, wasn't really rising that much. And it's risen a lot since then. And it's not just the recent years of immigration that's part of that. It's also kind of, you know, European Union. We've had high immigration, net migration in the kind of, you know, hundreds of thousands for a long time.

6:07Ed Conway:But we do need to talk about immigration. Because the levels of net migration that we've seen in recent, actually not small boats, although those are record levels as well. But that's piddling compared with overall migration. And, you know, we've talked about this before, Neil. We have never seen the levels of net migration that we've seen in this country in the last few years. It's totally unprecedented even as a fraction of the population. So it is right to kind of discuss that.

6:33Niall:But it's not right to talk about it in terms of things like the Great Replacement Theory, which, you know, if you look at what Jim Radcliffe is saying here, again, colonised by immigrants, draining resources. That's the sort of area that we're getting into. There will be people who have listened to your interview who now think Sir Jim Ratcliffe is a racist.

6:52Ed Conway:I prefer to stick to the kind of, as much as we can to the evidence. So draining resources, I mean, there's a lot of evidence and it's slightly contested and it's tricky to measure this stuff. But there is evidence that for many, I don't know if it's most, but many of the migrants that come to the UK put in more than they take out.

7:15Niall:It's certainly true until the last few years.

7:17Ed Conway:Yeah, and that's because for the most part, people are coming at a later stage so that we as the states, as a country, are not having to pay for their education. And also, for the most part, they're coming to work. And if you're coming to work, then you're providing taxes, usually, to the population. So there's that side, the draining of it. And then the colonization thing, again, to me, it's a shocking use of words. But it's also, even leaving aside the fact that he got the numbers wrong on the number of the population in 2020. The colonization point is also, I think, just straightforwardly, to believe that, you'd have to believe that these are people, that people are coming to this country and kind of permanently taking over, trying to create some political foothold.

8:03Ed Conway:But if you look at what's happening with migration right now, so I mentioned a moment ago, yeah, net migration was at record levels in recent years. It's a massive story. And frankly, we do need to be talking about that. And it's under discussed. And I think that there's a problem. People are nervous to talk about migration. But if you just stick to numbers, yeah, it was massively high back a few years ago, post-Brexit. Now, we're almost certainly in the coming years going to see net emigration. So you're going to see the number of people leaving the country outweighing the number of people coming in.

8:37Ed Conway:And that's going to be the first time that's the case for a long, long time. And what does that suggest? It suggests that these people were not colonizing the UK. They were coming in, they're working here or being students for a few years, and now they're going away. And if you look at the numbers, the claim is pretty kind of far-fetched.

8:56Niall:But philosophically, don't you think that this is a curious intervention from someone whose entire career has been reliant on open markets, global labour, free movement of capital? It's okay if you're rich. Yeah.

9:11Ed Conway:Look at Manchester United. I mean, he's based in Monaco. Yeah. That's the other thing. I mean, he's a tax exile in Monaco.

9:19Niall:I mean, he's shouting his advice from the departure gate, the other side of it.

9:22Ed Conway:And so there is that. But I think that there's this other thing that when you think about the UK, when you think about our economy and you think about our country, there's this phrase that was quite popular in the 1980s, Wimbledonisation. And the idea was, it was back before Andy Murray. The idea was, yeah. I thought you were about to start talking about your favourite football team. It's an analogy, which was mostly used about the city. But the idea was, yeah, we may not be able to win Wimbledon, but we can hold the best tournament and the best people from around the world can come and play here.

9:51Ed Conway:And the reason people use this word, Wimbledonisation, is in the city of London, the whole point of that was we're going to have the world's best centre for finance. And it's going to make everyone else wealthy because these people coming in, earning lots of money, admittedly, will be taxed more and they'll hopefully kind of, the money will trickle down. That's the theory. Let's not go into the full bit of what actually happened. Thank you. But nonetheless, the idea was let's have the best people from around the world here. And if you look at kind of the way that our economy has been run for a long time, it's kind of the notion, the overarching notion has been immigration is net a good thing because provided we ensure that it's the best people coming into the country.

10:30Ed Conway:so I think there's you know I think there's an interesting conversation about the extent to which the type of people coming in and whether they are kind of high skill workers or low skill workers has actually continued to be the case well is his argument then that there are good migrants and bad migrants but Neil look at Manchester United I mean like you know I talked about Wimbledon look at Man U that is a team there's a team of immigrants their entire strategy is to buy overseas and cross their fingers and hope for the best most of the managers are immigrants the players the best players we want in the same way that you know we want the best people in the world to be coming to to work here and working in AI and finance and everything else we want the best players in the world to be playing in the Premier League and that has always been the overarching kind of philosophy of the UK in economic but also kind of you know social terms and I think what's what's striking about this moment is has the recent kind of confluence of different things okay whether it's the cost of living crisis the struggles that everyone's going through right now the fact that everyone's just a bit depressed that we're not growing as fast as we could be growing.

11:32Ed Conway:And then also really high migration in recent years. Have all of those things kind of coalesced? And given people who do believe that it's colonization, like I say, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest it's colonization. And also the choice of word is offensive given our history of us as a colonial nation for hundreds of years. But nonetheless, are we now at a moment where, you know, Jim Ratcliffe clearly seems to believe this stuff and hasn't really retracted that word. How many people, you know, have listened to that interview and thought, well, actually kind of, I kind of agree with him.

12:08Ed Conway:That's, I think, something we should be thinking about and interrogating. And I think that's why I feel uncomfortable kind of talking, you know, I feel uncomfortable, frankly, doing a story that's just all about a word. I'm a kind of data guy. But even if you just try and look at the data underlying all of this. It's riddled with so many errors. That, for me, kind of knocks it back completely.

12:35Niall:Completely. But there were aspects to the interview where I think people would have been nodding along had it not been for other comments around migration. His general comments about the state of the British economy, growth out today, not 0.1%. It sounds like he's pretty bang on when it comes to that. The number of people who are on benefits of some kind goes to a point that you and I have discussed in this podcast before about the general level of productivity.

12:58Ed Conway:And the affordability of the UK welfare state. And it's the cross party thing, you know, the government, the Labour government kind of have concerns about this. Conservatives clearly, you know, did as well. We have an enormously expensive welfare state, but also health system. And we are not kind of generating the extra taxes that we might need to in order to satisfy that. And is it sustainable? I don't think anyone thinks that's sustainable. So I think there are a lot of really fundamental points that he raised that are serious. He clearly is sceptical now about Keir Starmer. He was, when he spoke to us last, which was a couple of years ago, he seemed like he was relatively positive about Starmer.

13:38Ed Conway:Now that didn't seem like it was a very kind of supportive stance that he took. Very positive though about Nigel Farage and Rafal. Yeah, well, pretty positive. Again, I asked that question that was right at the end because I know that he was supposed to be meeting with him recently. And also, frankly, when you start making comments like that about migration, people from Reform have been saying lots of similar things. So I asked him the question. He said he met with him and he thinks he's an intelligent man. But then by the same token, he said he thought that Keir Starmer was a good, intelligent man and he hasn't been able to sort it out either.

14:12Ed Conway:And Jim Ratcliffe is a divisive character. He's a tough guy. You get that impression when you meet him. He's tough. I think maybe you'd have to be a tough guy to be a kind of billionaire within chemicals, which is a really tough industry. And one of the things he said is, running Manchester United, we've taken some really difficult decisions,

14:29Niall:and I am really unpopular. Sacking the tea ladies. That kind of thing.

14:32Ed Conway:Yeah, really tough decisions. Yeah, exactly. Well, he says, that's kind of one of the only moments he smiled. I said, so you're unpopular. Do you feel unpopular? He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm unpopular. And his position is that there needs to be someone doing that for UK government and for the country as a whole. And that Keir Starmer is clearly not delivering on that. And maybe Nigel Farage would, but would he actually be able to take that on? I think that's where he stands. So it's actually more nuanced on Farage and reform than you might have thought. Sure.

15:05Niall:But do you think Jim Radcliffe is in any way bothered by the negative reaction to the comments he's made? I mean, the reason I say, I'm not going to read out in full because, frankly, there's no need to. But he has apologised now. One of those apologies for his choice of language offending some people. I mean, I thought No One Likes His We Don't Care was Millwall's song, not Manchester United.

15:27Ed Conway:I think as anyone who has had, you know, an argument with a friend or a spouse and it's ended with them saying, I'm sorry if you're upset. That's kind of what we've just got here, isn't it? I'm sorry if you're offended. And so I, you know, clearly.

15:45Niall:He's not apologised for any of the specific wording.

15:48Ed Conway:None of the words, none of the numbers. Clearly he believes this stuff. The numbers actually to some extent are neither here nor there. He believes this. That is his feelings right now. I have spoken to people at Ineos to ask if he wanted to go further than that. But that I think is as far as he's going to go. He's not going to do any more interviews.