People Turn to Poison Quick

Photo by Nat Callaghan

As the Buzzcocks sang in Ever Fallen in Love, “You spurn my natural emotions…” But I’m not talking romance here. I’m talking the spurning of a city’s plural identity.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of the Ineos chemicals group and co-owner of Manchester United—worth over £17 billion, and reckoned to be the seventh richest man in the country—has caused controversy after remarks made in a Sky News business interview.

Ratcliffe claimed the UK had been “colonised by immigrants,” suggesting...