Whatever Happened to Matt Goodwin?
From 'fully-paid up member of the liberal left' to Thatcherite national populist, David Edgar and Jon Bloomfield trace the trajectory of Reform UK's candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election
It’s clear that Reform UK loves a political defector. So far this year, the turncoat cohort includes Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, now joined by Matthew Goodwin. Once a self-styled “fully paid-up member of the liberal left” – at university he sported a Che Guevara T-shirt – Goodwin wrote his PhD thesis on the BNP and warned the Government against downplaying the dangers of the far-right. In 2014 he co-authored (with Robert Ford) an insightful analysis of UKIP, and later advised the Government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred. Now obsessively anti-Muslim, he’s Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, where 30% of the electorate is Muslim. His ultimate eye, so rumour has it, is on the job of Home Secretary.
In explaining Goodwin’s long and winding political journey, there’s lots of talk of Goodwin’s grudge at not being invited to dinner by then Prospect editor Alan Rusbridger after Rusbridger chaired a Conway Hall debate between Goodwin and David Aaronovitch in 2023. Be that as it may, the roots of Goodwin’s shift from national-populist analyst to advocate go deeper and further back.
The Key to the Turn
The crucial turn came in his second book, the 2018 National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (written with Roger Eatwell) in which he drops academic objectivity to argue that national-populist concerns were both “real and legitimate”. The book goes on to define national-populism as representing a 90-degree turn in the conventional political axis, combining “faith, flag and family” social-conservatism with interventionist economics, “speaking to voters who are sick and tired of being battered by the winds of globalisation”. The key to the turn being, as Goodwin puts it frequently, that “it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on culture”.
For Goodwin, the appeal of this cocktail to socially-conservative workers lay on the reverse side of the new fault-line, where a New (or Cosmopolitan or Metropolitan or Urban or Liberal) Elite, forged by Margaret Thatcher as well as Tony Blair, promotes both economic and social liberalism. Freed from the academic straitjacket, Goodwin has used his Substack column to make frequent calls for action on crime and immigration (“do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY” he demanded in 2023) and woke political correctness (“strip it all out”), while also taking on the “big global corporates”, with their “systematic tax avoidance” and “obscene executive pay”.
In his solo-written, 2023 Values, Voice and Virtue, Goodwin fleshes out the Elite as a Janus-faced enemy, promoting social liberalism (“abortion, homosexuality, casual sex, prostitution, divorce, gender equality and immigration”) but also being more “likely to view the world through an individualist lens”, more in favour of open markets and “least concerned about rising inequality”. In other words, free trade and free love, Thatcher meets Blair.
Who Are the ‘Liberal Elite’?
The obvious problem comes when Goodwin asks who these neoliberal libertines actually are, and answers “graduates”; sometimes the 6% who were educated at Russell Group universities, but more often a full quarter of the population. Yes, of course, this group tends to socially liberal views (about which Goodwin complains bitterly in his 2025 book attacking universities) but surely he cannot be claiming that the British graduate cohort consists largely of inequality-favouring, individualistic, market-loving, economic libertarians? And, indeed, his own data shows that a full half of the graduate cohort are “radical progressives” pursuing social justice, and very much concerned to promote equality and oppose capitalist excess.
The way Goodwin squares this circle is by inventing the straw person of “Woke Capitalism” (British firms supporting Black History Month or American companies opposing the gun lobby), to demonstrate that international big business is consciously promoting the Liberal Elite and its values, and thereby – as he argues elsewhere - “rapidly eroding the shared history, national identity, culture and symbols, such as cricket, which the majority cherish”.
It’s when the Woke Capitalist plot moves on to flooding the country with immigrants that the idea takes on a more sinister, conspiratorial colour. So, in 2021, Goodwin assured Daily Mail readers that “multinational firms” have formed “a sort of informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class”.
Goodwin is well aware that, in this argument, he is echoing the idea – promoted by Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign and since – that global financial elites are using immigration to undermine the cohesion of nation states. In the co-written National Populism, Goodwin describes the Hungarian version of the aims and objectives of the New Elite – particularly with regard to immigration: “Elsewhere in Europe, national populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán argue that liberal politicians within the EU, along with the billionaire Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros, are engaged in a plot to flood Hungary and ‘Christian’ Europe with Muslim immigrants and refugees, which they see as part of a quest to dismantle Western nations and usher in a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism”. On the next page, Goodwin and Eatwell assert that some of these claims are “not entirely without credence”.
Becoming Trumpian
Over the years, Goodwin’s opinions on the Trump phenomenon have wavered. In National Populism, he and Eatwell argued that – despite left-wing arguments to the contrary – Trump was not a fascist but, indeed, a national populist (a contention with which, at the time, it was possible to agree). After the attempted Capitol coup, however, Goodwin revised his opinion in a tweet: Trump was now “closer to the fascists than populists”. By Trump’s first 2024 primary victory, however, Goodwin had switched back, lauding Trump as the champion of a “national conservatism” that would overthrow the globalist establishment. Well before Trump’s second inauguration, Trump’s role in inciting the Capitol riot was forgiven and forgotten.
In the summer of 2023, Goodwin was already proposing policies that eerily anticipated those to be implemented by Trump 2.0. A year out from the British general election, Goodwin advised Rishi Sunak to “slash Net Zero costs and, while we’re at it, other unnecessary and costly woke policies like diversity, equity and inclusion programmes”. In March 2024 he recommended the deportation of “foreign nationals who glorify Islamic terrorism”, and the closing down of television channels and charities perceived to advocate extremism.
After Trump’s post-inauguration chainsaw firings of anyone involved with DEI, Goodwin undertook a thought experiment – “that has already caught the attention of none other than Mr Elon Musk” – in which he advocated further Trumpian policies that Goodwin argued should be applied here, from sacking striking civil servants to shutting down “radical woke ideology” in all public sector institutions, via banning the use of preferred personal gender pronouns and the wearing of rainbow lanyards to cutting funding to those who “advance anti-UK and anti-western positions”, and – oddly in view of the above – “the restoration of full free speech and the ending of censorship”. Speaking of freedom of expression, last October, Goodwin lauded Italy’s Giorgia Meloni for proposing legislation to ban the burqa and niqab in all public spaces and regulating mosques. However, for non-Muslim institutions, Goodwin is now heartily opposed to “regulatory intimidation”.
Immigration remains, for Goodwin, the primary political issue, sucking all other issues, vortex-like, down the conspiratorial rabbit-hole. After the Southport riots against asylum hotels, he insisted “Nigel Farage didn’t cause the RIOTS/ The ELITE CLASS DID”. (Elsewhere, Goodwin redefined the riots as mere “protests”). The undoubtedly despicable grooming gangs are consistently manacled to Goodwin’s determination to divide the white working class from other victims – and perpetrators – of crime. “Endemic migrant sexual violence against British women and girls” is stated as an uncontested fact (“endemic” in the OED: “peculiar to a people”, “habitually prevalent”, “due to permanent local causes”).
While in November last year, Goodwin insisted that legally-resident (or indeed, native-born) migrants who “refuse to assimilate” may hold a passport but “they are no longer part of our nation”: “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”. As Enoch Powell insisted in 1968 in his Eastbourne speech, “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a West Indian or an Asian still”.
Powell is a significant figure in Goodwin’s – and Reform’s – political trajectory. He held – in its most virulent form – to the traditional cocktail of Tory policies: believing fervently in economic liberalism and the free market, but also in a stridently ethno-nationalist approach to cultural issues like immigration. What we are now seeing in Reform UK – notably in Nigel Farage’s Banking Hall speech last November – see our ‘Thatcher in Turquoise’ piece in Byline Supplement – is a wholesale jettisoning of Goodwin’s “left on economics” policies.
Rightward Economic Shift
Happily for Goodwin, he is already ahead of the curve, an eager new member of Nigel Farage’s new model, let-the-market-rip Reform UK. In Goodwin’s end-of-2025 round-up, Thatcher has disappeared as a co-conspirator of what is now solely “the Blairite revolution” and there’s nothing about the wickedness of global corporates or obscene executive pay. His target is now solely “the big-state, big-tax, big-immigration economy” (in other versions he adds “Big Regulation”).
To clarify his rightward economic shift, Goodwin explains that his commitment to “leaning left on economics” was not about “economic redistribution and raising taxes” but, rather, appealing to what Farage also calls “the Alarm Clock class, the people who have to get up in the morning, work hard, pay their taxes”. And Goodwin’s “left on economics” answer? “Push millions of people on out-of-work benefits back into work”. As well as proposing – in another January 2026 Substack – a hyper-Thatcherite programme of “lowering the tax burden, slashing the size of the state, and dismantling the regulatory maze that smothers growth and enterprise”. In other words, back to Tory basics.
This is a common trend. In America, it’s clear that the free-marketeer Tech Bro Muskovites have beaten off the interventionist MAGArians. In France, Le Pen’s National Rally retreats from its statist economics. National-populist parties in or near power are ditching the economic interventionism in favour of neoliberal, conservative orthodoxy.
This has not led to any watering down of national-populism’s rabid propaganda on social and cultural issues. Goodwin is an increasingly enthusiastic proponent of the Trump administration’s theory of European “civilizational erasure” through mass immigration, expressed both in November’s US National Security Strategy – the EU waging “an aggressive war against Western civilization itself” – and Trump’s January Davos speech, in which he spoke of “unrecognizable” places in Europe “not in a positive way”.
On 23 January, Goodwin backed Trump’s thesis, insisting that nations “are held together by shared language, norms, history” and undermined by high-volume immigration which had not “happened by accident”, but had been “imposed from above” by the ill-defined but all-powerful liberal elite.
Ignoring the Real Elite and the Reality of the Working Class
As we have argued, Goodwin’s imaginary graduates are not a sinister, shadowy elite but a perfectly visible cohort of those who draw a monthly salary rather than a weekly wage. Many of the technical middle class may have gone to university but computer programmers, office workers, health staff and teachers face similar issues – stagnant real wages, insecure working conditions, high housing and energy costs – to those faced by manual workers.
Goodwin and his fellow national populist ideologues – people like David Goodhart, and Maurice Glasman – ignore the real elite, the 1% who dominate and shape the world economy: the Davos crowd and the tech bros; and the press and media owners who follow them and shape the political agenda. Instead, they seek to split the real-world workforce on the spurious grounds of national origin and skin-colour, using cultural and ‘woke’ issues as the wedge, above all focusing on immigration.
Thus, when the working class makes an appearance in Goodwin’s propaganda, it is always with the adjective ‘white’. The working class which Goodwin affects to defend and speak for never has any black or Asian or mixed race people. Indeed, his ‘white working class’ does not appear to include Irish, Scottish or Polish either. He never tells us in which workplaces this class actually exists. Go to car plants, warehouses, hospitals and fast-food joints across the country and you will find a mixed working class, reflecting the reality of today’s Britain.
Acknowledging the reality of 21st century Britain would also require denying the truth about crime which is declining in British cities. It would demand accepting the success – over many decades – of what Goodwin called “assimilation”, but we prefer to see as the significant integration of different groups in all walks of life across the UK. The last census shows record levels of mixed-race relationships, while the number feeling uncomfortable if a person of colour married one of their close relatives has fallen dramatically.
The danger of ghettoised enclaves has been much exaggerated and is now in decline: the country and its workplaces, music, food and sports teams have become increasingly inter-cultural. Goodwin and Reform may not have noticed but England qualified for 2026 World Cup with its last six goals scored by Eberechi Eze, Bukayo Saka, Marc Guehi, Ezri Konsa, Marcus Rashford and Noni Madueke, none of them with a white English parent born in the UK. As Goodwin now doubts whether people born in the UK from ethnic minority backgrounds are necessarily British it’s worth asking, who will he be supporting in this summer’s World Cup?
And is Goodwin really asking us to believe that the erosion of our “shared history, national identity, culture and symbols” is seriously under threat from immigration, much of it from the British Commonwealth, when the only actual example he gives is cricket?
The upcoming by-election is actually at least two different contests. One – in Gorton, representing two-thirds of the constituency – is for the 40% of voters who are Muslim and the many student voters, where Labour is fighting the Greens.
The other battle is for 86% white Denton, where Labour is competing with two right-wing parties, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, and Nigel Farage’s reconstituted, Thatcher/Powellite Reform UK. Badenoch’s fierce rebuttal of the most recent ‘One Nation’ Conservative attempt to rein in her stampede to the Right, confirms the common ideological ground now found across the British Right.
In his candidature announcement, Goodwin stated (in bold, no less) that “I am not a Tory”. He’s wrong. Two Tory parties – both aggressively neoliberal on economics, both increasingly feral on social issues like immigration – are fighting in Gorton and Denton, and as so many slip from one to the other, it’s increasingly hard to see which is which.
Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s revised and updated second edition of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right is published by Byline Books
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
The man's an idiot, he can't even get through an interview without contradicting himself.
It reads like his thinking is extremely muddled - I would like to read his views about resolving the problems in the English and Welsh Criminal justice system of which I suspect he is almost competely ignorant.