Has Britain been “colonised” by immigration? The co-owner of Manchester United Football Club, Jim Ratcliffe, apparently thinks so. Ratcliffe told Sky News that: “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.”
Immigration to Britain did spike to record levels in the last parliament – though Ratcliffe got the pace of change spectacularly wrong. The overall population was 67 million in 2020, rising to 69 million today. It had last been 58 million two decades earlier at the turn of the century. Ratcliffe’s mistaken assertion that the last five years had seen the population change of the past 25 years exaggerates the pace of change five-fold.
The total foreign-born population is now about 11 million people. That includes around 4.5 million British citizens who arrived before 2020, in addition to around 3 million European nationals here before Brexit in 2020. While immigration has been at its highest ever level, Ratcliffe’s influx of twelve million recent new migrants is clearly an imaginary exaggeration.
But the most significant thing about Ratcliffe’s comments is the language of being “colonised”.
It is a legitimate view in democratic politics to say that recent immigration has been too high, or that it needed to come down significantly. It was indeed the view of all the major parties at the last General Election, given the unprecedented numbers.
Talk of being “colonised” is qualitatively very different. It is a claim about dispossession, dominance and subjugation – with clear racial connotations. Britain is a post-imperial society: that complex history is central to how we became the multiethnic society that we are. It explains the ethnic diversity of major cities like Manchester today.
It is important to have an open and frank debate about immigration and integration. The voices of those who are sceptical, positive or somewhere-in-between about the economic and social impacts of immigration need to be heard. So how we talk about immigration should admit legitimate concerns: about the numbers, the scale and pace of change and the pressures of migration, as well its potential gains. Public confidence depends on handling the pressures of immigration fairly, for those who join our society and the communities they join. Getting that right depends on enabling an open debate, while setting some foundational boundaries against xenophobia and racism.
One useful test of the difference between legitimate and illegitimate concerns is to try to talk about immigration in a way that can make sense to white, black and Asian Britons alike – not just to vocalise the grievances of parts of one group against another. There are many ways to talk critically about immigration that pass that test: discussing numbers and control, pressures on services and housing, and cultural issues of identity and integration.
But in the Britain of the 21st century, “colonised” is a very unsubtle appeal to racialised grievance which fails this test entirely.
Those born abroad make up a large share of our colleagues and neighbours – and feature in the extended families of many people born in this country. The language of “colonised” indicates that there can be no co-existence of this kind: it presents the very presence at scale of migrants as the subjugation of the 75% white British majority group.
That is why this language of colonisation by immigrants is a clear echo of Enoch Powell’s 1968 argument that migrants and minorities would “have the whip hand over the white man”. It fuses it with the spirit of the ‘great replacement theory’, voiced in the Trump administration’s narratives of civilisational erasure in Europe, or the radicalised claims of the racist right that London, Birmingham and Manchester have been “lost” if the white majority group share dips below a symbolic majority.
A more constructive debate would talk about how we handle immigration – not play with radicalised fantasies of remigration that could reverse the last half a century of change.
Keir Starmer has apologised for using language that crosses this line. He apologised for his White Paper foreword citing the “incalculable damage” of high immigration – an existential argument – as well as famously regretting and withdrawing his use of the term “island of strangers” as failing to get across what he wanted to say about why integration matters.
That immigration should fall was the consensus view of all major parties at the last General Election once net migration spiked to unprecedented levels. Few people think the exceptionally high levels of net migration of the last parliament, peaking at 900,000, could be sustainable over time. Different people may take different views about future policy now that immigration has fallen dramatically to below the pre-Brexit level.
Jim Ratcliffe talked about the need for tougher decisions to reduce immigration – showing no recognition that this has happened. Net migration was down to 205,000 by mid-2025. The number of visas issued has fallen since, so net migration in 2026 is likely to be running closer to 100,000 now, though future policy decisions could change it again in either direction.
Indeed, British Future’s research finds that only one in six people have yet noticed this reversal in the trend. That exemplifies a significant lag in the media, political and public debates on immigration – though it also reflects how much the visible lack of control of boats in the channel dominates perceptions.
New data from British Social Attitudes show the public split on both the economics and cultural contribution of immigration: a third are negative, a third are positive, a third are somewhere in between. But views have rarely been so split by politics, with voters of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens much more positive, and those of the Conservatives and, especially, Reform seeing more harm than good. That explains why political leaders have contrasting views of Ratcliffe’s comments – with Keir Starmer and Ed Davey challenging them, while Reform’s Nigel Farage defends how the Manchester United co-owner talks about cultural change.
The challenge to secure public confidence on immigration depends on making some effort to reach across these divides. It is possible to talk about the pressures and gains of immigration, and how to make a diverse society work, in a way that reflects the country that we are today. It helps no-one when public voices use inflammatory language that sets different groups of people against each other.
