Reply With QuoteSays the billionaire owner of Manure whose first team squad relies overwhelmingly on foreign born players😂
Of course this country has a problem with illegal immigration but it is nowhere near as big (or costly) as the problem of a rising benefits bill which is overwhelmingly made up of white British.
DWP figures from Aug 2024 clearly show that the biggest proportion of benefits is paid in state pension ( some 13,000,000) which reflects our aging population. There were an additional 1,360,000 on pension credits. Next highest was Universal Credit at 7,000,000 (this continues to grow as older benefits such as housing benefit -2,200,000-are transferred to this new system), then PIP at 3,500,000 claimants (plus 1,300,000 on the old DLA) and 1,400,000 claiming Carers Allowance.
Of the est. 8 million on Universal Credit in July 2025, 76.5% were white, 10.2%Asian/British Asian and 6% Black/British Black which roughly reflects the same proportions of the population as a whole.
The worrying thing is that a fifth of our working population are foreign born either across the lower paid sectors (e.g. cleaning, care work) or certain higher paid ones (architects, vets, dentistry, IT, doctors). This is because we don't produce enough of our own to fulfil the needs in the higher paid sectors (despite more young people being in higher education than ever before) and because most British white people would rather rely on benefits than take poorly paid jobs.
While an increasing percentage of our population reaches pension age, the more alarming problem is that 22.5% of people of working age are not in work and the biggest driver of this are those from the younger demographic. This post Covid trend is the most worrying. In 2020, there were 1million on benefits who had a no work requirement, this had risen sharply to 3.7 million by July 2025.
Ratcliff's statements echo the deliberately divisive language of Trump, Farage and the far right. They take genuine concerns and grossly exaggerate and exploit them to their own ends. Most of the trope is around Muslims taking over British and European culture but whilst there has been an increase in those identifying as Muslim in the UK (currently around 6% of the country which is up from around 4.5% I'm 2021) it can hardly said to be a take over. I'm sure that Ratcliff doesn't even see the irony in his use of the word "colonised" given that many of the immigrants he is referring to come from country's previously run by the British Empire.
He is certainly be right in pointing out that both levels of immigration and of those on benefits are unsustainable, but his conclusions and rhetoric are IMHO dangerously wrong and feed into growing populism and divisiveness.
Originally Posted by baggieal
