What we are witnessing recently is an erosion of respect for people who are not white, alongside a growing boldness in expressing views that, to many of us, read as plainly racist.
A current example is the comments made by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, in which he said the UK has been “colonised by immigrants”. In my view, treating language like that as anything other than racist, or at the very least racially inflammatory, minimises real harm and can feel like gaslighting.
It is important to understand, though, that racism and the exploitation of people of colour never went away. What has shifted is not necessarily the existence of racism, but the way it shows up. Much of what was once pushed into coded, covert language is increasingly being aired more openly, and with fewer consequences for the people saying it.
Growing up in the 1970s, I experienced racism viscerally. I was called “Paki”, despite being of Indian heritage, told to “go home” even though I was born in London and knew no other home, and physically attacked because of the colour of my skin. I still remember being chased by a group of older youths when I was eight, they stole our cricket bat, and then forced one of their younger siblings to hit us with it.
Over time, racism has morphed. Today it often arrives as microaggressions, as casual exclusions, as “banter”, and as institutional indifference when minoritised Black and Brown staff raise concerns. It is not only that we experience unacceptable behaviours and attitudes, it is that organisations too often ignore them, excuse them, or downplay them as misunderstandings.
There is also the constant sense that our work is undervalued and more readily criticised. Many of us know we have to work harder than white colleagues to receive a fraction of the recognition, and even that recognition is not guaranteed.
What we are seeing now is not just a willingness among some individuals to share openly hostile views publicly and with impunity, it is also an effort to distort history.
To describe immigration as “colonising” the UK is, at best, a profound misuse of language. Colonialism was a violent project of conquest and extraction, Britain colonised India and many other parts of the world, taking land, resources, and wealth, enforcing hierarchies, and embedding division. By contrast, immigration to the UK has brought richness in culture, labour, innovation, and community, and the UK’s own institutions and economy have long depended on that contribution.
There is a final, uncomfortable point about consequence. When someone is wealthy, influential, and protected by status, inflammatory statements can be treated as mere controversy, a news cycle, a “regrettable choice of words”. Ratcliffe himself later said he was sorry his “choice of language” offended people. But for many minoritised people, the issue is not offence, it is impact. Words like these legitimise suspicion, hostility, and exclusion, and they land in a society where plenty of us already know what happens when rhetoric moves from private sentiment to public permission.