MANCHESTER United co-owner and INEOS CEO Jim Ratcliffe has apologised that his claim Britain has been “colonised” by migrants “offended some people in the UK and Europe”.
Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s richest men, was under pressure from a string of high-profile politicians, including Keir Starmer, to apologise for the claim.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer 'spends weekends complaining he hates being PM'
However on Thursday afternoon, Reform UK chief Nigel Farage defended Ratcliffe in an X video in which he makes multiple misleading claims about immigration in the UK. We decided to fact check them.
Here are the main claims Farage makes in the clip:
- The UK population has risen from 58 million to 70 million.
This statistic, first presented by Jim Ratcliffe, is wrong. Here, Farage presents it as fact, without clarifying the actual figures.
In an interview for Sky News broadcast on Wednesday, Ratcliffe said: “The population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70m – that’s 12m people.”
The UK population is estimated to have grown by nearly three million between 2020 and 2025, official figures show, not by 12m as claimed by the INEOS CEO.
The UK population in mid-2020 actually stood at an estimated 66.7m, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It had climbed to just under 69.5m by mid-2025, an increase since 2020 of almost 2.8m.
The UK population reached 58m in mid-1995, not in 2020, and passed 59m in 2001.
The population has grown by 12m since mid-1991, when it stood at an estimated 57.4 million, not since 2020. That means the increase he cited happened over the course of 35 years, not five.
- Around 9 million people of working age in the UK are on benefits, so “we don’t need mass migration.”
This statistic is misleading. Farage presents it as if all of those people receiving benefits are out of work, or able to work and choosing not to do so. This is not the case.
The latest available figures from the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) show there were 8,400,344 people in Britain claiming universal credit (UC) in December 2025.
A further 233,170 people in Northern Ireland were claiming UC as of August 2025, according to the latest data from the Department for Communities.
Together they suggest at least 8.6m people across the UK were likely to be claiming universal credit towards the end of 2025.
Universal credit is the main means-tested benefit available in the UK and has replaced the mixture of benefits previously in place, such as income support, jobseeker’s allowance, housing benefit and tax credits.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer scolded by Speaker for raising 'SNP embezzlement' at PMQs
Universal credit is available for people in work who are on low incomes, as well as those who are out of work or cannot work.
Of the 8.4m UC claimants in Britain in December 2025, 2.2m were in work, DWP figures show.
Some 4.2m were classed as not being required to work, which includes people in full-time education, over the state pension age, with a child under the age of one or who are considered to have no prospect of work for health or disability reasons.
A further 1.5m were looking for work while just under 0.5m were planning or preparing for work, meaning a total of 6.2m claimants were either not required to work or not in work.
- A “population explosion” is responsible for diminished public services and sharply rising rents.
Here, Farage is taking big problems and suggesting immigration is the cause of them. The facts show there are many contributing factors for declining public services and increasing rent costs.
Across the UK, too few homes are being built. In Scotland, an ongoing Scottish Government consultation acknowledges that we "urgently" need to see more homes being built. Scottish Government statistics released last year showed that work had begun on just 3031 social sector homes by September, the lowest figure since 1997.
According to the Centre for Cities, Britain overall has a backlog of 4.3 million homes missing from the national market as they have not been built. Fewer homes available means higher costs for existing ones, and thus higher prices.
A lack of social housing is largely down to decreasing local authority budgets across the UK, which is a symptom of over a decade of Conservative-led austerity.
Meanwhile in the private sector, a lack of rent controls also means landlords do not have to keep rents at a certain level. They are free to charge what they like, something campaigners have been raising the alarm over for some time as the UK's largest cities see prices continue to go upwards.
All of this, plus Margaret Thatcher's decision to sell off council homes many decades ago, have contributed to a housing crisis which is far more complex than Farage suggests.
He also mentions public services here. Austerity, as mentioned above, meant public services were cut significantly during the Conservatives' time in power. This left health and care services, local authorities and police forces struggling to do their work with fewer resources. According to the Progressive Economy Forum think tank, austerity resulted in half a trillion pounds of lost public spending.
The issue is far bigger than immigration.
READ MORE: Don't have children? Reform UK candidate says you should be taxed
- In parts of London, road names and Underground signs are in foreign languages as well as English.
There are two primary London Underground stations which feature key signage in languages other than English. Those are Whitechapel (Bengali) and Southall (Punjabi).
Southall has featured its name in Punjabi Gurmukhi script since the mid 1990s. The decision was made by the local community and council as a means of reflecting the area's large Punjabi population, which has been there since at least the 1950s. At its peak, Southall had around 70,000 Punjabi residents. That figure is now thought to be around half, though the area is still sometimes referred to as Little Punjab.
In Whitechapel, the sign came about in 2022 after a campaign from local politicians. Transport for London installed the signage, which appears next to "Whitechapel" written in English, to represent the local Bengali community. It is thought that Bengalis make up around a third of the Tower Hamlets area's population.
This is not a new community to Whitechapel or the wider Tower Hamlets area. Records show Bengalis have been there since perhaps as early as the 1920s, but migration grew most significantly after World War Two. By the 2001 Census, Bengalis already made up nearly a third of the Tower Hamlets population.
These Tube sign changes reflect long-term, well-established communities in parts of London, not new demographic changes as Farage suggests.
As for other multilingual signs in London, it is perhaps to be expected in a city that welcomes millions of tourists from around the world every year.
- About 1 million people in the UK “don’t speak any English at all.”
This is not true.
The figure seems to be sourced from the UK Statistics Authority's 2021 census, which found that in England and Wales: "1.5% (880,000) could not speak English well, and a small percentage (0.3%, 161,000) of the overall population could not speak English at all."
The one million figure Farage cities appears to come from adding those together. Not speaking English well is not the same as not speaking it at all.
- About 4 million people in the UK “barely speak passable English.”
It is hard to see where Farage got this statistic from, but it seems linked to the same 2021 Census as above. This report found that 4.1m people said they spoke "proficient" English but that it was not their main language. This is not the same thing as barely speaking "passable" English.
Share