NIGEL Farage has said that Jim Ratcliffe was right to say that mass migration has fundamentally changed the country.

He said on GB News: “Well, in the end, something had to come along, didn’t it, to ease the Prime Minister’s agony? And it emerged in the form of an interview with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s wealthiest people, worth an estimated £17 billion Sterling, of course, the founder of INEOS, a man, of course, that owns refineries up in Scotland, and is hugely successful businessman in every way.

“And, of course, a major shareholder and very actively involved with the running of Manchester United, whose fortunes on the pitch have turned quite a bit in the last few weeks, but these couple of sentences last night caused quite a storm…”

After a clip including the Prime Minister’s comment about “an island of strangers”, Farage said: “So, really quite similar in many ways, but that’s all changed now.

“No, no, the Prime Minister has turned his back on that, he said that Ratcliffe, his comments were offensive and wrong. Rachel Reeve said, unacceptable, disgusting, frankly.

“Now, actually, what he said about the population increase from 58 million to 70 million is true. What he said about 9 million people of working age being on benefits is true, by the way, to be fair, some of them are on in-work benefits.

“But if you’ve got that number of people on benefits, you clearly don’t need mass migration. It was the use of the word colonised that caused the problem.

“But I thought to myself, what does colonised actually mean? Well, it means when a group of people go into a different country and effectively take it over and turn it into their interpretation of what it ought to be, as opposed to what it was before.”

Referring to a clip showing name signs on two buildings in east London, he said: “I mean, have a look at Whitechapel Tube station, and you can see, you know, it may be there in English, but it’s there in a foreign language as well. And what about the Tower Hamlets Labour Party? Well, there, we don’t just have English, we have several other foreign languages.

“Now look, I’m teasing over so slightly, but the use of the word colonised, if we take that out of the equation, and by the way, that’s what he apologised for today, not what he said, the overall comment that mass migration has fundamentally changed our country, that the numbers are unacceptable, and that is made us poorer, I think he’s right.”