When Sir Jim Ratcliffe Plays the Colonised

As someone raised in a country shaped by British colonial rule, I know what domination looks like. Migration under UK law isn’t it.

It goes without saying that Sir Jim Ratcliffe is, to put it mildly, a bit of a dickhead¹.

A man based out of a tax haven pontificating on the state of a country that he abandoned is not someone who is ever going to be held in particularly high esteem by anyone who actually gives two flying shits about the UK.

However, in what feels like yet another episode of vice-signalling, Sir Jim decided to really push the boat out (no pun intended) in proclaiming in an interview that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants.²”

I would generally put this down to the words of a man who is clearly out of touch, however, when we consider the sustained campaign of punching down against immigrants, this is one of those situations that just adds even more fuel to the fiery conversations ongoing - and more than that, it does so in a way that’s deeply, deeply inaccurate.

Because the concept of “colonisation” is a very particular one, and the word itself does not at all mean what Sir Jim may think it does. It is simply not a metaphor for “demographic change makes me feel icky.” It is in no way shorthand for “my GP surgery is busy” nor is it a poetic flourish for saying “I saw a nail studio owned by brown woman where my local bookie used to be.”

Colonisation is a term with teeth - a word with a very deep history, and even more importantly it describes a very specific relationship of power.

If you strip down the act of colonisation right down to its base components, there are features that repeat themselves over geography and time, and they are:

1. Power asymmetry backed by a state - military, legal or administrative coercion.

2. Territorial control - land seizure, settlement and externally imposed borders.

3. Resource extraction in the form of labour, minerals, taxation, monopolised trade, etc³.

4. Institutional imposition like external law, language, education systems, property regimes, etc.

5. A racial or cultural hierarchy that’s used to justify the domination.

6. Violence or at the very least the credible threat of violence as enforcement.

That is what colonisation is. It is not simply “people arriving” in a country - it’s people arriving in a country with the backing of sovereign force who go on to restructure society entirely in their favour.

I personally grew up in a country that was shaped by British colonisation - I know what it looks like when institutions were built for another society. The history of colonisation in South Africa wasn’t simply a matter of ships docking in Cape Town and a few friendly Englishmen setting out.

A map of the British Empire in 1907 - Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was far more invasive, far more violent than that. It meant land appropriation codified into law. It meant entire populations dispossessed through legal frameworks that declared ownership null and void if it did not fit imperial property regimes. It meant borders drawn for imperial convenience. It meant English and Dutch law layered onto societies that had not asked for them.

It meant an economy that had been structured explicitly around extraction - first agricultural, and then once gold was found, mineral - where labour was coerced and mobility was controlled to serve imperial interests.

It meant the near genocide of tens of thousands of people, both black and white, for the purpose of transferring wealth from a land in the southern hemisphere to an island kingdom thousands of miles away in Europe.

I will also at this point say that I was not a part of the people that were most affected by this colonisation. By the time I was born, the demographic group I belonged to had moved from oppressed to oppressor, because white people in South Africa had not got rid of the institutions introduced by Britain.

They coopted them. They hardened them. Apartheid did not invent the architecture of domination - it inherited it, and the National Party weaponised it even further.

Pass laws. Forced removals. Educations systems deliberately designed to limit Black advancement. Political power explicitly restricted to a minority who claimed “civilisational superiority” as justification.

Black South Africans were made alien in their own country and stripped of every right and every shred of dignity and humanity by a power structure that was expressly designed to do that.

South Africa is only the most personal example, and this does not even touch on the legacy of British colonisation, including in India that still carries the scars of Partition, the after-effects of the violent oppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 60s in Kenya, the decades long Troubles in Northern Ireland or the fingerprints that are still left on countries that Britain had absolutely no right to be in.

That is colonisation.

It is not a crowded A&E, a long wait list for social housing or, shock horror, hearing another language on the bus. It is not about Sir Jim Ratcliffe having a fannywobble about misunderstood migration numbers.

Now, let’s apply all of the above concepts to migration that we have seen to the UK over the past decades with a few questions.

Have immigrants seized territorial control? No.

Have they imposed a parallel legal system that overrides Parliament? They have not.

Have they dismantled British sovereignty and replaced it with an external regime? Also no⁴.

Are they extracting British resources on behalf of a foreign crown? Nope.

The immigrants who arrive in this country every day do so under British visa systems, are governed by British courts, can be deported by British authorities, pay tax into British institutions and are subject to the laws of the British state.

With this in mind, there is simply no reasonable way that anyone can say that Britain is being “colonised” when migration is happening under explicit British sovereign control.

There are huge issues in this country. Housing supply is dangerously constrained, public service capacity is overwhelmed, the NHS is on its knees trying to service an ageing population and the equality gap is widening as I type.

Each one of these issues, however, has sweet blue fuckall to do with immigration and everything to do with political and planning failures. They have come into existence on the back of choices made by multiple governments over the past four to five decades.

You are more than welcome to argue that these decisions were reckless, short-termist and economically incoherent - but what you cannot do, without completely sanitising the term, is call it “colonisation.”

The whole situation becomes positively farcical when we take into account that Sir Jim Ratcliffe is currently an immigrant himself in Monaco where he has been living since 2020 in a move that will save him around £4bn in taxes that could go towards fixing the actual issues that he seems so terribly worked up about. The stench of hypocrisy, in this case, is nearly overwhelming to the nose.

Bringing this to a close, I have to make clear that I do not think that immigration policy is beyond criticism, nor do I think that immigration to the UK has zero effect on public services and resource allocation. A country of course has a right to discuss issues around numbers, labour markets and capacity. Those are legitimate questions and subjects worth discussing, not the least of which uncovering why the UK has become so dependent on migration across the labour market, healthcare, students and propping up our economy.

Serious debate, however, deserves serious language.

When people like Sir Jim Ratcliffe start throwing around words like “colonisation” to describe migration that takes place under our laws, through our own systems, overseen by our own elected government, we are not clarifying, illuminating or in any way having a grown-up conversation. We’re inflaming and replacing policy with propaganda and panic.

Britain, I repeat, is not being colonised. It is being governed - sometimes well, sometimes not so well - by people that we have elected to make decisions on our behalf. If the decisions that these governments have made have led to public services collapsing, housing supply being completely outstripped by demand and widening inequality, that is on the state and most certainly not on the nurse, engineer or careworker who have come here under its rules to work and live here.

We can argue about migration levels, but what we simply cannot do is redefine history to make ourselves feel besieged.

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1. This is mild phrasing and my internal thesaurus contains alternatives. This is me showing some serious restraint.

2. One of those cases where this is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence - evidence not supplied in abundance by Sir Jim.

3. It is worth noting against this that migrants when arriving young in this country are by a large extent net contributors to the exchequer - so diametrically the opposite.

4. If you had not noticed, Parliament is still sitting in Westminster, doing its thing.