In full: Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe says UK 'has been colonised by immigrants'

Well, they are unsurvivable in my opinion really because irrespective of how efficient you might be as a business or a chemicals business to survive in this highly competitive world. It's very much a global business. Chemicals with energy costs which are three or four times the USA, with carbon taxes which have quadrupled since 2020 and allowances of half since 2020, and our competitors who import product don't pay carbon taxes and product that comes in from various parts of the world but predominantly China and is dumped in the European market, those are unsurvivable conditions for chemicals.

It means you can't make any money. In chemicals you need to be profitable otherwise you don't survive just of pure simple economics really. But you need to be able to make enough money to invest in the assets and maintain the assets because they're dangerous assets and it's like you know put it in simple term it's like your car. If you don't maintain your car eventually it breaks down you know. So there needs to be enough cash in our business to be able to maintain those assets and manage them safely otherwise you have to close them down and when I mean if you take I'll give you an example we have a very large petrochemical complex in the middle of Germany in Cologne and our carbon tax bill for the facility is 100 million euros per year. A facility that size in Texas pays no carbon tax even if they sell all their product into the UK. So over a 10-year period, that's a billion of cash that's taken out of that business in Cologne and it's a billion of cash which otherwise would have been spent on maintaining the asset and on top of that you know the incremental energy costs for Cologne compared to America are another 150 million for gas and electric.

Well, I think that's simple. They will close down and we will bring imports in. Nothing will survive in petrochemicals and plastics with these current conditions. You can't make no we are first quartile in chemicals and plastics in Europe with probably the biggest petrochemical player in Europe today. And no it's not survivable people. So it will be replaced by imports but it will be replaced by imports from countries which don't have the same regards for the environment who are probably a coal-based economy. So their carbon footprint will be double our carbon footprint.

Yeah. like China's the biggest example because China there's so much over capacity in China that you know they're simply trying to utilize their capacity and to do that they'll deliver product at very low cost into Europe. And but then of course when all the you know if you decarbonize Europe by de-industrializing Europe it part of that will have taken place because of cheap imports. But of course once our indigenous production has gone then the imports are no longer cheap because then of course the prices will rise and you know it'll be a strangle hold over Europe.

I think increasingly they get it. Yes. I mean I've spoken directly with Bart De Wever here in Belgium. And bear in mind Belgium is the largest chemical cluster in Europe. It's a little bit like Houston in America. And undoubtedly the prime minister of Belgium Bart does get it. I've spoken with President Macron because we have some large facilities in France and he gets it and I've spoken with Chancellor Merz and of course chemicals is very big in Germany. So they do get but of course you have to navigate and I'm not an expert by any means but you've got a European Commission, you've got a European Parliament, you've got a council for the EU and you've got the European Council and that's quite a complex set of bodies to make change and you know we need changes in Europe otherwise it will be too late but it's quite a slow laborious bureaucratic complex process because you've got 27 member states and then you've got these four layers of bureaucracy sat on the top.

I think that's simple. I think we need protection from product that's being dumped into Europe. That's the first thing. There's wave after wave of product coming into Europe and we need protection from that. And that's protect, you know, tariffs and anti-dumping. Yeah, sort of duties or tariffs or anti-dumping duties in Europe take two years to implement. In America it takes 6 months and that's just simply it's simply too long to allow people to dump in the marketplace for two years before we do anything about it. So that would be number one. You need to it's made worse of course because America has put walls up around its marketplace. So a lot of the product that was going into the USA is now diverted into Europe. So the pressure in Europe is even greater.

I think Europe shouldn't worry about that too much. I think if you look at the chemical industry in Europe it's so fundamental to the way in which we live today. You can't run hospitals without a chemical industry. You can't feed people without a chemical industry and you can't make weapons. You can't defend yourself without a chemical and plastics industry. So they're really serious national security issues. Well, it is going at the moment. We've had 100 chemical sites shut in the last two years and it's the waves of chemical sites closing at the moment. If you look at the top 10 participants in chemicals in America, they're all investing. If you look at the top 10 in Europe, they're all leaving and closing down. Yeah, you can see it everywhere, unfortunately. But one, you need in terms of what we have to do, I think in Europe to stem the problem that we've got at the present and save the chemical and plastics industry. One, you need to protect the borders, stop the product being dumped inside. Two, you've got a carbon tax which is doing the opposite of what it had very honorable intentions of carbon tax and you can sort of understand the principles of it. But what it's doing is it's such a burden on manufacturing in Europe that it's effectively closing manufacturing down in Europe and we're exporting the jobs and exporting the product. So it hits the economy, it hits jobs, but also it increases global emissions because the product that's been displaced from Europe is produced in a country which is predominantly coal based for energy and their carbon footprint is at least double the carbon footprint of a European producer. So the carbon tax is doing the opposite and it's just squeezing the lifeblood out of chemicals because we just don't have spare cash to pay. I mean where do I find 100 million in Cologne to pay my carbon tax bill on top of energy costs which are three or four times what they should be. And then the third element is energy where we are three or four times the price of America and we need competitive energy prices. There's nothing we as a chemical industry can do about that. Those are all sort of government controlled things. So they need to forgive some of the green levers.