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Has 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large European inflows from 2004 to 2016 have fallen to negative net migration flows for the year ended July 2025 and been replaced by a much bigger increase of immigration from outside the EU.
What changed after the pandemic was not just record levels of immigration, but a different, more ethnically diverse – less white – composition of migrants than the pre-Brexit mix. According to data, the most common countries of nationality of those who arrived between 2021 and 2024 (pre-settlement) were India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
So it is unsurprising that anti-racism group Kick It Out found the language unacceptable. This is why Manchester United’s statement distancing themselves from their co-owner – “our diverse group of players, staff and global community of supporters reflect the history and heritage of Manchester, a city that anybody can call home” – emphasised anti-racism as part of its broader commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.
The complex story of empire and post-imperial Britain is central to explaining who we now are – and the multiethnic society that we have become. As the British-born child of migrants – a doctor from India and a nurse from Ireland, who met while working in the NHS – it felt obvious to me from a young age that this country’s history had quite a lot to do with how our country was today.
That is why for me, and probably many other ethnic-minority Britons, Ratcliffe’s choice of words echoes Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” argument – made in a speech just a week before my dad arrived here from Gujarat – that “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.
Powell wanted the Commonwealth migrants of the post-Windrush era to go back home because, he argued, it would become a matter of national suicide if they had children here. So the birth of people such as me – or Rishi Sunak, or Shabana Mahmood – would be one more stick on the funeral pyre. According to Powell, we could never be British, whatever our passports said.
Talking today of Britain being “colonised”’ by immigrants fuses that Powellite fear with the newer US import of the “great replacement theory”, which sees immigration as an elite plot to replace the majority white group. We have seen this invoked in the Trump administration’s warnings of “civilisational erasure” in Europe, or the claims of the racist right that London, Birmingham and Manchester have been “lost” to lawless migrant communities.
This zero-sum argument suggests that the very presence, at scale, of minorities represents the subjugation of the white British majority. It is voiced by those promoting radicalised fantasies that mass “remigration” could still reverse the last half-century of change in our society.
Politicians often talk about “legitimate concerns” about immigration. It can be a clunky phrase, but it is an important one. Arguments about getting the policies and numbers right are part of difficult but important democratic debate. A common-sense test of where to draw that line is to talk about immigration in ways that make sense to white, black and Asian Britons alike. Talking about “colonisation” fails that test.
The half-hearted non-apology he has issued does not go far enough: he should disown the inflammatory language of colonisation. There is a very important difference between a democratic debate about immigration and efforts to weaponise it against migrants. Jim Ratcliffe needs to concede that he has crossed that line.
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Sunder Katwala is director of British Future
