Billionaire tax evader blames poor people for Britain’s problems
Speymouth
73 year old billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s own racist granddad, moved to the tax haven of Monaco in 2020 in order to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. He’s doubtless one of those English people living abroad who considers himself an ‘expat’ and not an immigrant. It’s equally likely that he doesn’t speak much French in his daily life and has done the square root of bugger all to integrate into the local community in the country in which he is a migrant. None of this however, stops Jim from pontificating in an interview with Sky News about how “the UK has been colonised by immigrants”.
We might pause for a second to appreciate that a member of the British establishment has finally recognised that colonialisation is a bad thing, all those migrants whose countries were colonised by Britain that Jim is now whinging about would like to have a wee word, however we must also pause to gasp at the hypocritical audacity of a tax evading migrant like Jim having the unmitigated gall to complain that hard working people in poorly paid jobs, people who pay far more of their income in taxes than Jim does, are the real root of Britain’s problems, and not greedy billionaires like him who refuse to pay their fair share in taxes to support the public services and pay for the education and training of the workers who made him rich.
The problem with the UK, Jim, isn’t a Filipina care worker who looks after elderly people with dementia, a Pakistani train guard, or an Iraqi Kurdish delivery driver, it’s the likes of you. The real problem with the UK is the greed, avarice and entitlement of billionaires like Jim who believe that all of society should be structured in a way that facilitates Jim sucking up more and more money like a cocaine addict hoovering lines of Bolivian marching powder up their nose. 73% of immigrants in the UK are working and paying a greater percentage of their income in tax than Ratcliffe does.
Ratcliffe, who has an estimated wealth of £17 billion, also took a pop at people on benefits. Ratcliffe’s businesses have received millions of pounds in public money including a £120 million subsidy for the Grangemouth chemical plant which he later closed. The British Government has also given him a £600 million guarantee in order to build the biggest petrochemical plant in Europe, near Antwerp in Belgium. The enormous petrochemical plant has been condemned as a “carbon bomb” by environmental campaigners. The government has also committed some £600 million to improve transport and infrastructure around Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United, owned by a certain Jim Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe complains about benefits claimants, while benefiting from hundreds of millions of pounds in public money, provided by a government which he moved to Monaco in order to avoid paying taxes to. 38% of those in receipt of Universal Credit are in work, their benefits are effectively a subsidy to employers who do not pay a living wage.
It’s scarcely surprising that polling identifies immigration as one of the issues which most concern voters, the British media bangs on about it incessantly and in lurid and dramatic terms. Meanwhile we have a Labour government in Westminster whose idea of challenging the race baiting immigration scaremongering of Reform UK is to agree with them.
Interventions like Ratcliffe’s don’t help to bring clarity or objectivity despite his later half hearted – I’m sorry if you were offended half-arsed sorry not sorry and his claim it was important to discuss the need for controlled immigration. Controlled immigration is exactly what we have right now. For the past six years my husband and I have been navigating the Byzantine, intrusive and expensive British immigration process. We have a friend who is a medical doctor in the USA who wants to retire to Scotland. He is wealthy, self-sufficient, has comprehensive private health insurance, and actively volunteers in his local community. He would spend money and contribute to the Scottish economy, but there is no legal route to settling in Scotland open to him. He now plans to retire to Ireland instead. Ireland has a retirement visa scheme for foreign nationals who are financially self-sufficient and who have private health insurance. Scotland’s loss is Ireland’s gain. If Scotland had a similar scheme, talented and financially self-sufficient individuals who are part of the Scottish diaspora could return to Scotland and make a contribution here. But that can’t happen without independence.
Ratcliffe’s statement was based on a platform of misinformation. He falsely asserted that the population of the UK increased from 58 million in 2020 to 70 million now – an increase of 12 million, an increase which he implied was due to immigration. This is a ludicrously false claim: in 2020 the population of the UK was 67 million, the current population is 69.3 million, the increase since 2020 owes as much to natural population growth as to immigration. The population of the UK was 58 million in 1995, over thirty years ago.
It suits Ratcliffe just fine when politicians focus on immigration because that means they’re not talking about the ever widening gulf between the richest and the rest of us and billionaires like him who suck on the teat of public subsidy while moving to Monaco to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. If our media gave even half the publicity to the grasping greed and hypocrisy of billionaires like Ratcliffe and the ever yawning chasm between the richest and ordinary workers, the UK would be a socialist republic by now, and that is of course precisely why they don’t do that but instead feed us a diet of scaremongering about hard working migrants, upon whom we are going to rely more and more as the birth rate drops below replacement level. Farage and is ilk have already caused the UK untold economic and political damage with Brexit, with the help of the British media they look set to compound the damage with their racist fixation on immigration.
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