Billionaire Jim Ratcliffe: UK Has 'Had Enough' of Tories

I wasn't a fan of the non Dom change. I I thought that was very foolish. I have to say I don't, but that wasn't that wasn't Labour, that was conservative that came up with that smart idea 60,000. I mean, you've got 60,000 very wealthy people in London. Why do you want to? Why didn't you want to? Why do you want to encourage them to leave? Make any sense to me really, because they all bring, you know, enormous value to that economy in the South of I mean, most of the non Doms are in London in the South of England, but I think I think that regeneration of southern Manchester would attract quite a lot of investment. What what's your take on on the UK right now? The elections on the UK? Is it good for business? I mean, you're here, you know, here in, I think that, you know, the Conservatives now have had, you know, a fairly long, they've had a fairly long stint and they've, they've put forward a whole series of prime ministers that haven't been terribly successful really, to be honest, the last four or so. So it's, you know, I think the UK, everybody in the UK now, you can see that the mood in the UK, everybody's ready for a change. They've had a, they've had enough. And so it's, you know, I think I've met Keir Starmer a couple of times. I like Keir. I think you'll do a very sensible job. You've been disappointed with the way Brexit has been run. Is that a fair qualification? Yeah, he does actually. I agree. Yeah. So how would how would you, how would you do it differently and, and how do you think Labour will deal with it? Would you be, would you ever go into politics? No, No, I don't. I don't think they'd have me actually. I'm probably not. I'm not PC enough, I don't think for politics and I'm certainly not very woke. But no, I mean, how would you run the country? I think, how would you run the country? I think for me the, I mean you've got immigration which is 1 issue and the other issue is, is the economic issue. If you, if you just look at the economic issue for the UK, it's really, in my view it's quite simple is the UK economy is £2 trillion, the GDP is £2 trillion and the government take half of it, at least half of it. So the government spend is £1 trillion, right? So in my view, the major, and if you look at Ineos, we spend 60 or 70 billion a year, something like that. The government spends one trillion, an awful lot more than ours. So you need to spend the money well, because you're not, you're not spending your own money, you're spending the, the population of the UK. It's money. And you know, there are good reasons why people pay taxes. You've got, you know, healthcare, you've got police, you've got roads, all those types of things. And I don't think the government manages those things very well. And I don't think it focuses on them very well. And I don't think it's got the right quality people running them. And but they're spending a trillion pounds. You know, the health service is a mess. We don't have security anymore. Education's a bit of a mess. You know, we can't run sewage systems in the UKI mean, you know, the, we had sewage systems running in the Victorian era. And, you know, we allow all the utility. I mean, just take that as a simple example. We, we allow all the water utilities to be sold off. They were mainly bought by French companies and the French companies pay 5050 billion pounds in dividends, but don't reinvest in the equipment to ensure that we've got top class equipment to manage our, you know, sewage and drinking water facilities. And then all of a sudden it's a crisis. I mean, why doesn't the government say we want to buy our water utility then? These are the minimum requirements you need to, you know, and if the people don't behave, then do what they do in America. They block them up. You know, there's some consequence of you if you misbehave. So you've got that whole issue of the economy and then you've got immigration and they haven't dealt with immigration. They've sort of danced around. But I think we had 500,000 people come in the UK last year. Well, 500,000 people. There's two times the size of Southampton. I mean, two Southamptons in a year and you think about all the infrastructure, it's one of the the basic problems we've got in it because we've allowed so many people into the country. And that will go on forever because, you know, we speak English in England and all the planet speaks English now and there are 8 billion people in the planet and they're going to be 10 billion people by 2050. So there's always going to be a flood of people trying to get into the UK. So they need to be able to deal with it. But we, we probably have got, you know, an infrastructure for 50 or 55 million people and we've got 68 million people. So the hospitals don't work, the roads don't work, nothing works. And you know, at the end of the day, somebody has to say, no, you can't, you know, we can't, we can't take any more people in because if you, if you bring 500,000 people in in a year, how many schools do you have to build? How many roads do you have to build? How many suit systems, how many police stations? And we're not doing that. We're just sort of cramming them all in on the existing infrastructure. And it doesn't how, how do you think Labour will will deal with that? Do do you think, you know, secure will be a, a good Prime Minister? Well, I think it, I think he, I mean, I, I think he's a very sensible man and it's an intelligent man. So I don't, I don't know, I think you'd probably have to do some unpopular things to be able to get those, those types of issues dealt with. It's like at Manchester United, I'm having to do some things which are unpopular. But I mean, I'm, I'm happy to be in a political environment in a way. You know, it's a bit, I mean, I think at the end of the day, doing difficult things and, you know, a degree of unpopularity in a funny sort of way might make you more popular because somebody's saying that you're standing up and making some difficult decisions rather than just some blowing with the wind a bit. I don't know. I mean, time will tell. I can't predict how how that will all go.