Forget Jim Ratcliffe’s half-apology: to speak of immigrants ‘colonising’ Britain is wrong and sinister | Sunder Katwala

He fused an echo of Enoch Powell with the spirit of the far right’s great replacement theory. This is no way to progress a humane migration debate

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as Britain been colonised by immigrants? That is what the Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe claimed in an interview with Sky News. He later said that he was sorry that his “choice of language has offended some people”, saying that what he had intended was to talk about how to control and manage immigration to promote growth.

While Ratcliffe did not define the immigrants by race, to talk about Britain being “colonised” will inevitably be heard that way by many people. After all, the fact that Britain is a multiethnic and multifaith society today reflects the imperial and post-imperial history of Britain colonising much of Africa, and south and south-east Asia – and of postwar immigration from colonies and newly independent Commonwealth states.

That is reinforced by the dramatic shift in post-2020 immigration. The large European inflows from 2004 to 2016 have fallen to negative net migration flows for the year ended July 2025 and been replaced by a much bigger increase of immigration from outside the EU.