Bogeymen from the billionaire’s playbook

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in The Yorkshire Post on 24 February 2026 in which Matt Bromley argues that billionaires need to find new bogeymen…

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who this month claimed that “Britain has been colonised by immigrants”, is the latest in a line of wealthy elites stoking division while shielded from the consequences. 

During an interview on Sky News, Ratcliffe suggested that immigration and welfare dependency were a drain on the UK’s economy and social fabric. The Prime Minister described the remarks as “offensive and wrong”. The irony of a man who’s shifted his tax residence to Monaco — reportedly saving an estimated £4 billion in UK tax — lecturing ordinary Britons about economic burdens was not lost on commentators, either. Only Nigel Farage defended him, insisting “Jim Ratcliffe is right”. 

Farage added, “You ask yourself why public services have diminished… the population explosion has done that. And then you look at parts of London, for example, where the road names, the Underground signs, aren’t just in English, they’re in a foreign language as well. One million people in this country don’t speak any English at all, four million people living in this country barely speak passable English.”

Farage always needs a fact-check. According to the 2021 Census, 4.1m people were ‘proficient’ in English but did not speak it as their main language, while 880,000 could not speak English well and only 161,000 could not speak it at all. Ratcliffe’s claims are also worth checking: The latest figures from the DWP show there were 8.4m people claiming Universal Credit in December 2025, including 2.2m who were in work. Meanwhile, net migration to the UK was 204,000 in the year up to June 2025, a decrease of 69 per cent on the previous year. The UK population stood at 69.5m in mid-2025, up from 66.7m in 2020, and 57.4m back in 1991. At the time of the last census, around 16 per cent of people living in the UK were born abroad. Ratcliffe has been a Monaco resident since 2020. 

Ratcliffe’s outburst is part of a broader trend — one in which billionaires manipulate people’s anxieties for political and economic leverage. Elon Musk’s another example. An immigrant himself, he’s repeatedly amplified misleading narratives suggesting immigrants are a threat to public services. At one political event in the US, he showed a “mind-blowing” chart purporting that millions of non-citizens received Social Security numbers, but the numbers are neither secret nor scandalous; they reflect legally authorised immigrants being integrated into the workforce and paying taxes, not a torrent of benefit claimants. 

The result of these high-profile misrepresentations isn’t just misinformation; it’s the redirection of public frustration away from real economic grievances and toward bogeymen and scapegoats. Why are so many families feeling less well-off? Real factors include stagnating wages, rising housing costs, cuts to public services, and decades of tax policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy. These pressures leave hard-working people vulnerable to narratives that simplistically blame outsiders for complex structural challenges. 

Politicians and commentators on all sides should resist the temptation to personalise systemic economic stress as the fault of migrants or the vulnerable. As I’ve argued before in this column, immigrants contribute positively to economies, often filling labour shortages, paying taxes, and starting businesses — research finds no support for the idea that immigration is a net drain on public finances. 

Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy continue to shape policy and public opinion in ways that shield their own interests. When Ratcliffe criticises welfare while enjoying the benefits of tax havens, or when Musk stokes fear about immigration while his own platforms propagate misinformation, ordinary Britons suffer the consequences.

The task for political and civic leaders is not just to call out such rhetoric; it’s to reframe the debate toward the real issues: fairness, investment in communities, equitable taxation, and a social discourse that unites rather than divides.  

Read more of Matt’s columns for The Yorkshire Post…