RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Ignore the Left-wing outrage. Millions agree with Ratcliffe. Parts of Britain HAVE been ‘colonised’ by migrants

Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has apologised after his remarks about the UK being ‘colonised by immigrants’ sparked a predictable furore of confected outrage.

The Prime Minister seized on Ratcliffe’s comments as a convenient distraction from his own current political problems. So too did the beleaguered Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Everyone from Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to the BBC and the Guardian gleefully joined in the condemnation. The Football Association said it was launching an investigation into whether Ratcliffe had brought the game into disrepute.

You can always trust the FA to leap on any passing woke bandwagon. No doubt there’ll be a minute’s silence and Taking The Knee all round this weekend.

One Left-wing pundit on Sky News, which broke the story, deliberately missed the point and wondered if Ratcliffe would now tell his foreign Man Utd football stars they were no longer welcome.

Inevitably, in this age of the ubiquitous knee-jerk social media pile-on, some of the reaction was hysterical. But hurling ignorant abuse is about the level of debate to which we have descended.

Talking about ‘colonisation’ was always going to be a red rag to the Left-wing bull. Colonisation is right up there with ‘racism’ in the Left’s lexicon of hate, regularly used to falsely portray Britain’s proud history as one of global pillage and slavery.

It was recently rolled out to justify Starmer’s shameful decision to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and by extension, the Chinese.

To be fair, it has to be admitted that those who accused Ratcliffe of hypocrisy over immigration had a point. He is after all a multi-billionaire who has relocated to Monaco to avoid British taxes.

But with the caveats and the noisy, self-serving virtue-signalling out of the way, it is worth paying attention to what Ratcliffe actually had to say, no matter how clumsily he may have said it.

He is after all a spectacularly successful businessman who has created tens of thousands of jobs in Britain and poured billions of pounds into the Exchequer. The main thrust of his remarks was aimed at the state of the economy.

First, though, let’s consider his apology. He actually said he was sorry if his choice of words ‘offended some people’ but the not the substance. There were millions more people who will have agreed with every word.

First out of the blocks were Reform leader Nigel Farage and ex-Reform, now an independent, MP Rupert Lowe, himself a former chairman of Southampton FC. Farage tweeted: ‘Britain has undergone unprecedented mass immigration that has changed the character of many areas.’

Lowe said: ‘Ratcliffe is right. And I respect him for having the balls to say it’, adding: ‘[The UK] has been colonised by immigrants. That’s just a fact. No point pussyfooting around it.’

Ratcliffe may have mangled his figures but the underlying facts are indisputable. If he’d have said the population has risen by 12 million since the year 2000, not 2020, he’d have been bang on the money. And they are just those who turn up in the official statistics.

As long as 25 years ago, then Commissioner of the Met, Captain (now Lord) Beaujolais, told me there were between 250,000 and 300,000 foreign nationals in London about whom the police knew nothing.

A quarter of a century later, how many migrants are living here illegally? Your guess is as good as mine.

That’s before you get to the tens of thousands of small boat arrivals who arrive here illegally every year and are given food, lodging, free health care and pocket money by the Government and face less than zero chance of ever being deported.

No one with eyes in their head can deny that mass migration has changed the face of parts of Britain irrevocably. For example, look no further than my colleague Robert Hardman’s brilliant despatch from Birmingham this week. When I worked in Brum in the late Seventies the city was genuinely multi-cultural. Today, in areas like Sparkhill, it’s monocultural – almost overwhelmingly Muslim.

So, too, are many of the old mill towns in the North of England, where elections for councils and Parliament are being fought over Gaza, not potholes and the state of the pavements.

Farage and Lowe are right. Many areas of our towns and cities have been colonised by migrants. It’s how the Pakistani rape gangs were able to get away with it for so long. The police were afraid of upsetting the local ‘community’.

A few years back, my old friend Trevor (Now Sir Trevor) Phillips, then head of the Equalities Commission, warned that Britain was sleepwalking towards segregation. Surkeir himself said we were becoming an ‘island of strangers’ before bottling it and doing another of his world-famous U-turns.

Ratcliffe also said migrants were costing the country too much money. Well, last October it was reported that 1.9 million foreign nationals were claiming a variety of benefits, along with 1.49 million people born abroad who are now British citizens. As of last November, that number was rising by 500 a day.

This week we also learned that migrants make up one in ten of all new GP patient registrations, at a time when the health service is stretched to breaking point and burning through billions of pounds every week.

Look, this has always been about numbers. Nobody is arguing about legal, controlled migration and granting visas to skilled workers such as medical professionals and, yes, Premier League footballers.

The real problem is the vast influx of low-skilled and unskilled workers, bringing with them dependants who put further strain on the benefits and welfare system.

Yes, we are grateful to migrants who come here to work in the care system and elsewhere. But there are only here because millions of our fellow citizens are claiming out of work benefits for pretend illnesses.

Ratcliffe’s statistics may have been muddled but his analysis was spot on. We can’t go on importing migrants to do jobs British citizens refuse or consider themselves too ‘disabled’ to do.

Nine million people of working age are now considered ‘economically inactive’– 6.5 million on out-of-work benefits, the rest not even looking for work. It’s the road to ruin.

Yet Starmer has run away from reforming welfare and in the last Budget, Reeves ladled even more billions at the occupants of Benefits Street, while yet again clobbering the productive, wealth-generating sector.

As Ratcliffe put it in his ‘apology’ statement, more of a clarification actually: ‘My intention was to stress that governments must manage migration alongside investment in skills, industry and jobs so that long-term prosperity is shared by everyone. It is critical that we maintain an open debate on the challenges facing the UK.’

Sadly, open debate isn’t something this Government and its Left-wing supporters are prepared to countenance.

Rather than address the myriad problems facing the country, and taking the genuinely hard, however unpopular, decisions needed to reverse economic decline, tackle the welfare monster, slash the benefits bonanza, and reduce both legal and illegal migration, they prefer to sick their fingers in their ears and scream ‘racist’ at anyone who has the effrontery to spell out the inconvenient truth.

His language may have been inadvisable, but on the big issues which matter, including mass immigration, Jim Ratcliffe was right.