https://arab.news/9ddda
If Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire businessman and co-owner of Manchester United, had only followed the wise advice of Irish missionary Amy Carmichael that “Let nothing be said about anyone unless it passes through the three sieves: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?” he would have saved us all from his bigoted, ill-informed rant on the UK being colonized by immigrants. He could also have saved himself from the justified criticism by a broad segment of British society, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who immediately labelled Ratcliffe’s comments as “offensive and wrong,” and called on him to apologize.
The controversy followed a TV interview in which Ratcliffe said: “You can’t afford … you can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in.” He then added: “The UK is being colonized by immigrants, really, isn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.” In a relatively short passage of about 30 seconds, he managed to skip Carmichael’s three criteria by being factually wrong, offensive, and to what end?
To begin with, associating migrants with living on benefits, which translates in the mind of the right-wing anti-migrant groups in the UK into draining the public coffers, is false. Putting the two together in one sentence is taken from the hymn sheet of the most extreme xenophobes in British society, which is bound to dangerously sow more seeds of friction and discord. It is also not true that 12 million people have arrived since 2020. More accurate figures show that in that year, 66.7 million people lived in the UK, and the country’s population was last estimated at 58 million in 1995. In this case, it took three decades for that increase, not five years. It is correct that, since the beginning of the century, migration has been a bigger contributor to population growth than the UK birthrate most years, but without it, there is a good chance the economy would have suffered a decline, in addition to missing out on the other benefits of the UK becoming multicultural.
