There is something almost breathtakingly rich about a billionaire who has chosen to live in Monaco lecturing Britain about what is wrong with Britain.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe has declared that he has lost confidence in the UK, describing the country as being “on the slide”. He blames high taxes, immigration, welfare spending and what he sees as the failure to exploit Britain’s remaining North Sea oil and gas reserves.
Perhaps he should try living here.
Ratcliffe, whose fortune is estimated at around £15 billion, has been a tax resident of Monaco since 2020. Monaco is famous precisely because of its extraordinarily favourable tax regime for wealthy residents. Ratcliffe has made a perfectly legitimate personal decision about where he wants to live and arrange his affairs.
But having made that decision, he should perhaps be rather more careful about lecturing the rest of us about the state of Britain.
It is particularly difficult to take seriously his complaint that Britain is driving wealthy people away when he is himself one of the wealthy people who left.
Ratcliffe claims that “politics of envy” is responsible for Britain’s supposed hostility towards wealth. But ordinary people asking whether the richest individuals and corporations contribute their fair share is rarely envy. It is a perfectly legitimate question in a democracy.
And there is an enormous difference between creating wealth and expecting the public to subsidise the conditions in which private wealth is accumulated.
Britain provides the infrastructure, educated workforce, legal system, transport networks, public institutions and services on which businesses depend. Those things do not materialise by themselves. They are paid for collectively through taxation.
Ratcliffe wants Britain to provide the conditions necessary for his businesses to prosper while simultaneously complaining about the taxation required to maintain the country in which those businesses operate.
That is quite some sense of entitlement.
His intervention on North Sea oil and gas is similarly revealing.
There is a serious debate to be had about energy security. Britain needs reliable energy and sensible long-term planning. But Ratcliffe’s preferred answer appears to be remarkably convenient for someone whose company operates the Forties Pipeline, transporting a substantial proportion of North Sea oil.
When a billionaire businessman tells the government that it is “insanity” not to exploit more of the resource in an industry in which his own company has major interests, the public is entitled to ask whether this is really an objective assessment of Britain’s national interest or also a businessman defending the interests of his own business.
That does not make his arguments automatically wrong. It simply means they should not be treated as disinterested wisdom from some neutral observer.
Then there is immigration.
Ratcliffe has repeatedly made immigration a central part of his critique of modern Britain. Earlier this year he caused widespread controversy by saying that Britain had been “colonised by immigrants”, before apologising for causing offence.
Again, he is entitled to his opinions.
But Britain has never been some isolated island populated exclusively by people whose families have lived here since time immemorial. Modern Britain has been shaped by migration for centuries, and the economy depends on millions of people who were born elsewhere.
It is particularly strange to hear a businessman whose own company is an international operation presenting immigration as though it were somehow an alien intrusion rather than one of the realities of a modern economy.
Ratcliffe says that “somebody needs to” tackle immigration and welfare.
Perhaps somebody also needs to tackle the extraordinary spectacle of billionaires demanding sacrifices from everybody else while positioning themselves outside the tax system they are criticising.
Britain undoubtedly has problems. Public services are under pressure. Housing costs are punishing. Investment and productivity need improvement. Energy security requires serious attention.
But these problems are not going to be solved by the richest people in society standing on the sidelines and shouting that Britain is broken.
Ratcliffe says he would return to Britain if “things got better”.
How convenient.
The rest of us do not have the luxury of waiting in Monaco until Britain has been sufficiently improved to meet our personal requirements.
We live here.
We pay taxes here.
We use the NHS here. Our children are educated here. We depend upon Britain’s infrastructure, public services and communities.
And when things go wrong, we cannot simply relocate to Monaco.
Ratcliffe can.
Indeed, he already has.
So perhaps the next time Sir Jim Ratcliffe wants to tell Britain how badly it is doing, he might pause for a moment and consider the extraordinary irony of his position.
He says Britain is failing.
He says taxes are driving people away.
He says politicians are not doing enough.
And yet when given the choice, he chose to live somewhere else.
That is his right.
But having walked away from Britain for a tax regime he evidently finds more attractive, he should expect people to question the credibility of his lectures about how everyone else should run the country.
If Jim Ratcliffe has lost faith in Britain, nobody is forcing him to come back.
But perhaps he could spare us the moaning from Monaco.
