When one of Britain’s richest industrialists says the United Kingdom has been “colonised by immigrants”, Indians are entitled to raise an eyebrow.The remark was made earlier this week by Jim Ratcliffe — founder and chairman of Ineos and co-owner of Manchester United — during a televised interview on immigration, welfare dependency and economic growth. The comments drew a rebuke from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who described them as “offensive and wrong”.Ratcliffe later clarified that he was speaking about immigration levels and economic pressures. Even so, his choice of the word colonised — in a country whose global power was built through actual colonisation — is difficult to ignore.Ratcliffe is not a fringe agitator. He represents mainstream British corporate power, a beneficiary of global markets and international labour flows. That makes the vocabulary all the more striking.For Indians, the word carries particular weight. Britain did not merely trade with India; it ruled it. First through the East India Company, then directly under the Crown. By 1900, nearly 300 million Indians lived under British imperial administration. Railways were built, yes. So were famines. English was institutionalised; so were laws, taxes and governors. Delhi was ruled from London.Jim’s other comments are also on record. He said: “You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in.” He suggested Britain needed “somebody who’s prepared to be unpopular for a period of time to get the big issues sorted out”. He also claimed the UK population had risen by 12 million in five years, a figure contradicted by the Office for National Statistics, which estimates the UK population at 69.3 million in mid-2024, up from about 67 million in 2020.Facts matter. Especially when empires are invoked. In 1947, Britain left India not because Indians colonised Britain, but because India insisted on independence. The Raj ended. The flags changed. But something else endured: administrative systems, legal codes, commercial routes, educational linkages and migration pathways. Empire does not evaporate. It reorganises.Post-war Britain rebuilt itself partly through Commonwealth labour. Caribbean nurses staffed the NHS. South Asian foundry workers powered the Midlands. East African Asians revitalised retail and small business. Migration was not accidental; it followed imperial lines of familiarity: language, law, documentation, mutual recognition of qualifications. The routes were mapped long before the passengers boarded.Today, India is one of the largest source countries for migrants to the UK under skilled worker and student visa categories. Indian-trained doctors play a significant role in the UK’s National Health Service. British universities host tens of thousands of Indian students each year. Indian companies — Tata among them — employ tens of thousands in Britain. London’s financial sector recruits from Mumbai and Bengaluru as routinely as it once did from Manchester and Glasgow.That is not colonisation. It is reciprocity shaped by history. When Indian professionals move to Britain under skilled worker visas, they are not planting flags. They are filling labour shortages in healthcare, technology and finance. They pass English language tests, the same English Imperial Britain once insisted they learn. They navigate biometric systems, Home Office interviews and salary thresholds. They arrive with documentation, not gunboats.If this is colonisation, it is oddly compliant.Jim is co-owner of the Manchester United Football Club. The Premier League markets itself aggressively in Mumbai, Delhi, Lagos and Jakarta. Indian fans wake at improbable hours to watch Old Trafford under floodlights. The club’s commercial success depends on precisely the global networks that migration critics question in other contexts. Manchester United’s dressing room is multinational by design. No one claims the club has been colonised because a striker comes from Scandinavia or South America.Globalisation is celebrated when it sells jerseys. It becomes suspect when it fills hospital wards.Colonisation implies conquest, displacement, subjugation. It is the word Indians use when describing the Battle of Plassey or the aftermath of 1857. To apply it to regulated migration — student visas, work permits, health-care recruitment — stretches the metaphor past recognition.Jim is not an imperial aristocrat. He is the son of a carpenter, a grammar-school graduate, a self-made petrochemicals magnate. His biography is one of post-war British social mobility. Which makes the moment more revealing, not less. The beneficiaries of global Britain sometimes forget how global Britain was built.You cannot build an imperial trading system, expand a global language, market universities worldwide, recruit international capital and talent, and then express astonishment when the flows run both ways.India did not colonise Britain. Nor did Nigeria or Ghana. Nor did Poland. Britain constructed an imperial network that evolved into a migration network. The ships changed; the routes did not. If anything, what we are witnessing is not colonisation but continuity, the long afterlife of empire in visa form.The empire once sent civil servants to Delhi. Today Delhi sends consultants to Canary Wharf. Ships sail both ways. And history, unlike rhetoric, keeps receipts.— The writer is the London correspondent of The Tribune
