Why fear-driven language about migration collapses under evidence, economics and basic humanity
By Richard Kirtley, Feb 13th 2026
Sir Jim Ratcliffe says Britain has been “colonised by immigrants.”
“Colonised” is a powerful word. It is designed to be. Colonisation evokes the thought of invasion, takeover, loss of control. It stirs something visceral and once that image is planted, it is very hard to uproot.
But if we slow down, if we replace metaphor with measurement, the picture looks very different.
Take, for example, the number of people arriving, last year, in small boats. 41,472 is the number.
That number is reported relentlessly. The number of small boars arrivals regularly leads bulletins and news-pages. It dominates debate. It fuels outrage. It feels that is is single handedly fuelling the surge of the far right. It becomes shorthand for a country supposedly under siege.
But forty-one thousand people is roughly the capacity of Villa Park football stadium. Fill the ground once, and you have the annual total.
Britain, meanwhile, is home to around 67 million people.
A single stadium’s worth of people, spread across twelve months, does not amount to colonisation. It does not resemble invasion. It is not an occupying force.
Small-boat arrivals are only one part of the migration picture anyway. Migration into Britain is overwhelmingly made up of students, skilled workers, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers, hospitality staff, construction workers. These are brilliant people who arrive through legal routes because employers need them, universities recruit them, or families sponsor them. Migrants bring tremendous economic value to this country.
They start businesses at high rates. They pay income tax, National Insurance, VAT and council tax. They fill shortages in sectors where domestic recruitment has fallen far far short. International students contribute billions to the UK economy every year, sustaining universities and local economies (just look at the dire financial circumstances at Universities which are being partly caused by a decrease in international students). Skilled migrants support industries from technology to finance to healthcare. Younger workers arriving in economically active years help rebalance an ageing population. This is not merely a sentiment. It is economic fact.
Yet, we are constantly clickbaited into outrage by images of small boats crossing the Channel. The footage loops. The numbers flash. The narrative hardens.
But people do not undertake a 22-mile sea crossing in an unstable inflatable boat for trivial reasons.
My brother once swam to and from France in a relay challenge with his university swimming team. He still describes it as the toughest, most brutal experience of his life, physically and mentally, even with his support boat, preparation and safety planning.
Now imagine attempting that journey not as an athletic challenge, but as a desperate gamble. In the wet. In overcrowded conditions. In fear.
There is a video circulating of a small boy crying “Daddy, daddy” as his father tries to get them into a boat. If you are a parent, that sound does something to you. It cuts through rhetoric. It strips away abstraction. It reminds you that migration is not a spreadsheet. It is human beings making decisions under pressure most of us will never face.
That does not mean borders do not matter. It does not mean policy does not matter. It does mean, however, that the language of colonisation is grotesquely misapplied.
Colonisation is extraction by force. It is power imposed from the outside. A brief scan of most British history books should be enough to remind us of the horrors of what true colonisation is. Regretfully, the British were rather good at it. Migrants arriving in Britain today are not extracting wealth through coercion. They are applying for visas, accepting jobs, studying at universities, paying rent, working shifts, building businesses and contributing to tax receipts.
There is another irony that is hard to ignore. Sir Jim Ratcliffe is part-owner of Manchester United. The majority of the players in that squad were not born in England. Many are, technically, migrants. They were recruited globally because talent is global. Football is global. The Premier League is a global enterprise.
Is he feeling so colonised by them that he plans to send them home? Of course not. Because when migration produces value and when it scores goals, fills stadiums, drives revenue it is called recruitment, ambition, global excellence. But when migration arrives in a small boat, it is called invasion.
There is no colonisation taking place. There is a modern economy interacting with a connected world. There is movement of labour, skills and people, just as there has been for centuries.
The real danger is not demographic takeover, therefore. It is rhetorical escalation.
Inflammatory language splits. It hardens suspicion. It turns neighbour against neighbour. It reduces complex economic and human realities to viral soundbites.
Britain is not being overrun. It is being reshaped, as every country is in a globalised age. Migrants are not an occupying force. They are workers, students, business owners, teammates, parents.
A stadium’s worth of desperate arrivals across a year is not colonisation.
It is a reminder that behind every headline is a human story and behind much of Britain’s economic resilience is migrant contribution.
We would do better to talk about that.