Ratcliffe, who made most of his estimated €17 billion fortune in the chemicals industry with his company INEOS, told Sky he had recently met Farage, but stopped short of endorsing him to become prime minister over incumbent Keir Starmer.
“I think Nigel is an intelligent man and I think he’s got good intentions,” said Ratcliffe. “But in a way, you could say exactly the same about Keir, when Keir came in. I think it needs somebody who’s prepared to be unpopular for a period of time to get the big issues sorted out.”
Earlier in the interview, Ratcliffe asserted that Britain is being “colonized by immigrants,” citing numbers that are not accurate.
“You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in,” he said. “I mean, the U.K. has been colonized. It’s costing too much money.”
“The U.K. has been colonized by immigrants, really, hasn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.”
While there has been a large increase in net migration since Britain left the EU, the numbers are not as notable as 12 million in four years. As pointed out by Sky in its article, the population of the U.K. was, in fact, 67 million in 2020. It hasn’t been as low as 58 million since the year 2000.
