Hooray for a British industrial hero at the top of the Rich List

It’s heartening to see an authentic British entrepreneur heading this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the industrial-ist Jim Ratcliffe, who has overtaken a coach-load of oligarchs as well as the Duke of Westminster with an estimated £21 billion fortune. This column has long admired Ratcliffe, whose Ineos chemicals conglomerate was built by buying up businesses his major competitors did not want. During his stand-off with the Unite union at the Grangemouth Refinery in Scotland in 2013, I called him ‘an industrial hero’ who deserved to be made a Knight of the Thistle for his willingness to invest in such an unpromising site. While BBC Scotland expressed the more common view of him as ‘the embodiment of hard-nosed, freewheeling capital’, one of Ratcliffe’s own early business partners told me: ‘You couldn’t meet a more decent bloke. He’s very private, but he’s also incredibly generous.’

It’s fair to say that Ratcliffe’s unspun Mancunian manner has never done him any favours, however. Up here in North Yorkshire, Ratcliffe’s face is unknown but the name of Ineos provokes fierce hostility as his company pursues plans to frack for shale gas, possibly including horizontal drilling beneath the North York Moors National Park. That’s a debate I’ve learned to duck, since so many of my neighbours are extremely upset about it, but it’s interesting to contrast the public image of Ineos with that of Sirius Minerals, the company that is constructing a giant potash mine in another previously unspoilt stretch of our countryside, close to Whitby.

Potash mining is by no means as controversial as fracking in terms of alleged health and pollution risks, but both bring ugly industrialisation to the rural landscape, to the understandable distress of local folk. Sirius — which is a public company, dependent on access to public markets — has been assiduous in building relations with landowners and communities, effectively winning over all nimbyist opposition.