by Ross Clark, Spectator
Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics in his head. But how typical that the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues, as well as the Guardian and many others, have chosen to latch onto a loose remark the billionaire Manchester United co-owner made about migration rather than address the very genuine concerns he has for the UK economy.
Read between the heavily edited clips from Sky News’s interview with the chemicals entrepreneur and the point he was trying to make when he said that Britain is “being colonised by immigrants” is clear. You cannot grow an economy healthily when you have an ever-expanding number of people on out-of-work benefits. The result is that employers have been forced to turn to migrant labour to fill the gaps. That has helped the economy to grow in recent years, although only just – real GDP per capita is only just ahead of where it was in 2007 – but it has come at the price of putting greater stress on public services and the housing stock.
The growth in people on out-of-work benefits over the past decade has been astounding: up from less than 4 million to 6.5 million. The extra numbers who are economically inactive are a huge deadweight to be carried along by those who are in work. If we want a healthy economy we are going to have to reverse that growth in people parked on out-of-work benefits.
When Labour was elected in 2024 some of its ministers were prepared to say this, and were up for doing something about it. “What we won’t do,” said the Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden last March, “is sit back and relax and pretend it is a progressive thing to do to watch two million, then three million, then four million people go on to these benefits – many of them never working again.” But then meaningful welfare reforms were blocked by the Labour Left and all went quiet.
Read also: Why was Jim Ratcliffe punished for speaking the truth? by Brendan O’Neill, spiked