Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United’s tycoon investor and Britain’s self-proclaimed chemical king, has taken his £17 billion fortune across the Atlantic. Why? Because Labour dares to tax the super-profits his oil and gas empire has been raking in. He wants us to believe that this is about “certainty” and “stability”, about Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans, about Britain being hostile to business. In truth, it’s about one thing: he doesn’t want to pay his tax. They never do.
We should call this what it is: blackmail by capital. Ratcliffe didn’t build his billions on fresh air. He built them off North Sea reserves, the sweat of workers at Grangemouth, and a Britain whose infrastructure and education system nurtured him. The moment he’s asked to return a fraction of that wealth (to pay for hospitals, schools, pensions, for the society without which his empire could not exist) he turns heel, shuts down a refinery, lays off 400 workers, and cries “hostile environment.” The real hostility is towards the working class, not towards billionaires.
But when it comes to Manchester United, Ratcliffe is only too happy to lean on the state. He’s floated the idea of public support for a new Old Trafford, presenting it as a “national stadium,” a gift to the country. Translation: he wanted the taxpayer to underwrite his private empire, to subsidise the very leisure project that would burnish his global profile. For oil rigs, he demands deregulation and lower taxes; for football, he demands subsidies and state backing. Heads he wins, tails we lose.
This is a familiar script. The rich take the gains in good years, offload the losses in bad years, and threaten to flee whenever democratic governments try to claw anything back. They demand flexibility from workers, certainty from governments, and deference from the press, but they offer only disinvestment, closures, and threats in return.
And what of the Tories, with Claire Coutinho now mouthing lines straight from Ratcliffe’s press office? “Sky-high energy prices,” she says, are the fault of carbon taxes and Net Zero, not of the privatised system her party designed to extract every last penny from household bills. Growth and jobs, she insists, come from drilling every inch of the North Sea, not from investing in renewables, insulation, and public ownership. It’s fantasy economics dressed as common sense, another round of oil-stained nostalgia peddled as patriotism.
Ratcliffe is not unique. He’s emblematic of the problem. The dominant class never wants to pay its tax. It demands austerity for the many, subsidy for the few. Labour’s timid windfall levy is no radical gesture; it’s the bare minimum. If this is enough to make the super-rich flee, then perhaps Britain should be asking what use these billionaires are at all.
