Shaken Not Stirred

“The U.K. has been colonised by immigrants,” Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the INEOS chemicals group and minority owner of Manchester United Football Club, said in a recent interview with Sky News on Feb. 12, 2026. Though Ratcliffe has since apologized for these comments, his sentiment reveals a rapidly growing, pervasive attitude against immigrants that has gripped Britain over the past few years. 

The irony of Ratcliffe’s statement is almost palpable; not only does he partly own a football team where 19 members of the men’s first team are foreign players, but, as a fellow Briton, he is surely aware of the country’s painful history with colonization. Thus, his objection to immigration, considering this context, feels tone-deaf and jarring.

And yet, his view is not uncommon. Over the past two years, there have been numerous large-scale and at times violent anti-immigration protests and confrontations in the United Kingdom. Notably, on Sept. 13, 2025, over 100,000 people marched in London as part of the anti-immigration “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Organised by far-right activist Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, popularly known as Tommy Robinson, the protest centered around an apparent defense of free speech as well as British heritage and culture.

Yet, I would wager that a large proportion of these protestors put down their placards on the night of the 13th to don their football club’s scarf the next day to cheer on foreign players. It’s all right because those are the ‘good’ ones, right? Immigration isn’t a problem when it scores the last-minute winner or has been your neighbor for years, because those aren’t the ‘wrong’ type of immigrants. 

This argument is illogical at best. The distinction between the ‘good’ immigrant and the ‘bad’ immigrant has never been about contribution. It is rooted in familiarity and proximity. The people love their starting striker because he entertains. The neighbour isn’t a threat because they grew up together. But the immigrant child, who has risked everything, arriving on the beaches of Dover? That’s the threat. Therein lies my contention with the immigration debate in its popular form. There is no principle to the position; it’s an opinion governed by emotions, and emotions have no consistency. 

We need principles and honesty when it comes to immigration; otherwise, we aren’t any better than those on the far right who preach intolerance and spread hatred. Recognizing the inherent tensions and anxieties that come with immigration isn’t wrong, but weaponizing people’s fears and spreading disinformation to stoke division cannot be the answer. The immigration question isn’t going away, but the highly polarised discourse surrounding the topic must be if we expect progress in any way.

That being said, good faith is a two-way street; immediately labeling expressions of anxiety as racist is just as dishonest as calling every immigrant a burden. Fear of the unknown is natural. People on all sides have a right to be taken seriously when they see their communities changing or have concerns surrounding public services and issues that government documents rarely capture. 

From a certain angle, there is something poetic about Britain’s current struggles with immigration. A nation that spent centuries imposing its culture on other countries without invitation now quivers at the thought of others wanting to share in its prosperity. It did not ask its colonies if they wanted to be British; Britain simply arrived and laid claim to lands it never had a right to in the first place. 

And when the British needed help, in the aftermath of WWII, they called on immigrants to aid. The Windrush generation, for example, came to the United Kingdom because they were asked to by a government in desperate need of labour, not to colonize and eat at the soul of the nation, as some on the right-wing would have you think. From 1948 through the 1970s, nearly 500,000 people moved from mainly Caribbean British colonies for a better life and to help rebuild the nation. For their troubles, they were falsely labelled as illegal immigrants, rewarded with decades of discrimination, and in several cases threatened with deportation despite being British. 

Even crueler than the treatment of these citizens is the fact that this didn’t happen because of a few extremists, but was government-sponsored hostility against immigrants. Theresa May, who at the time was Secretary of State for the Home Department, introduced the “hostile environment” policy in 2012 with the expressed intent of making life intentionally difficult for those living in the United Kingdom without legal immigration status. 

What it did, in actuality, was drive a climate of fear and anxiety for tens of thousands who had every right to be in the country in the first place. Asking people to rebuild a nation with you, only to create a trap that erases their existence, is not an error. It is a particular kind of cruelty—one we see again in Ratcliffe’s commentary. 

The Britain that exists today—its food, music, hospitals, and very identity—was built by English hands and Indian hands, Nigerian hands and Jamaican hands, by the shoulders of people we will never know yet still stand on. The athleticism Britain is so proud of is rooted in similar populations. The nation was built by people who came with nothing and gave everything to a ‘tolerant’ society, which, more often than not, couldn’t bear to tolerate their very existence.

I find more often than not that the voices that call the loudest to protect British identity and ‘our way of life’ are the ones who understand it least. The Britain they want to protect is mythological; it’s never existed, and the Britain we ought to fight for is the one that we have right now.  

Ultimately, the United Kingdom deserves an immigration debate rooted in facts, not dictated by trigger words and clickbait. Serious issues deserve serious discussions, not ones that collapse under the weight of their contradictions. Britain cannot celebrate its diversity and, in the same breath, condemn those who make the country diverse. That’s not principled reasoning but rather projected selective outrage. 

Noah Basden ’29 (nhbasden@college.harvard.edu) should have come up with a better column title.