THE
OPPORTUNIST EXTREMIST
The
Strange Radicalisation of Matthew Goodwin
Joe
Mulhall
https://hopenothate.org.uk/state-of-hate-2025-matthew-goodwin/
Writing
for Chatham House in 2011, Matthew Goodwin asked, “What drives some citizens to
abandon the mainstream in favour of populist extremists?” Since then, he has
gone on to answer the question himself.
Today,
Goodwin is one of the most influential radical right figures in the country.
His reactionary Substack has over 69,000 subscribers, he has his own show on GB
News, and he is a vocal supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, offering
strategy advice and whipping up crowds at the party’s conferences. Fulfilling a
long-held dream, he is now a well-known media commentator, finally receiving
the attention he always felt he deserved.
This
wasn’t always the case. Goodwin was once a serious academic working to
understand the drivers of far-right extremism, and for most of his career
relatively liberal, seen by colleagues as hard working, bright and ambitious.
He produced several books and articles on the British National Party and the
wider far right. He even sat on the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working
Group and wrote impassioned articles for The Guardian denouncing Islamophobia
and warning of the dangers of far-right politics.
Sadly,
this has all changed, and in recent years his rightward shift has seen him
become a fully-fledged radical-right activist.
Radicalisation
Some have
argued that Goodwin became radicalised after he “went native” or “drank the
Kool-Aid” while studying UKIP for his two co-authored books, Revolt on the
Right and UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics. The
argument goes that his time with Nigel Farage and other prominent UKIP figures
actually served to redraw Matthew Goodwin.
The truth
is more complex. Looking at Goodwin’s earlier academic work, it is possible to
discern a sympathy for the concerns of those who voted for far and
radical-right parties. He has long argued that their anger was justified, or at
least understandable, and that their supporters had been ignored by mainstream
politicians. This certainly isn’t a radical position and has been argued by
many in social science and beyond for decades. The difference with Goodwin is
that he’s gone from sympathy for the voters, to sympathy with the far-right
parties preying on them.
Yet there
is another common thread that can be traced from his earliest days in academia
through to today, one that explains his seismic political shift better than
anything else. After speaking with a range of former colleagues and academics
who have worked with or known Goodwin over the years, there emerged one common
point. From his earliest days in academia, he was ruthlessly ambitious,
supposedly motivated more by personal advancement than a love for or interest
in the topic that he researched.
Goodwin’s
political shift is perhaps best explained by his desire for recognition.
Numerous former colleagues recall his frustration at the speed of his
advancement and a growing bitterness at those he blamed for it. This might seem
odd for someone who gained a professorship in his mid-thirties, but it was
recognition from the golden circle of British universities – Oxbridge and the
major London institutions, rather than his employer at the University of Kent –
that he most desired. Other colleagues recall Goodwin’s difficulty with taking
criticism – necessary in the peer reviewed world of academia – with one calling
him “aggressive, brittle and deeply insecure”.
He
allegedly felt that his politics, described by numerous colleagues as “working
class Tory” at the time, resulted in discrimination against him. The “liberal
elites” at these institutions were apparently preventing him from getting the
jobs he deserved. This may go some way to explaining why he has now published
two polemics about intellectual narrow mindedness in academia: Values, Voice
and Virtue and Bad Education.
The fork
in the road came in 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Former
colleagues mention that he was appalled by the reaction of his peers to these
events, feeling in some cases it was they who had been radicalised, not him.
For Goodwin, it appears that this fed into his already existing prejudices.
These were the same people – the new elite – who were thwarting his personal
ambitions.
Despite
being a professor, Goodwin wanted more. Colleagues from this time recall joking
that he was always likely to become a TV pundit or MP. Finding that he had
impressive access to the right of the Conservative Party and leading figures in
UKIP, it seems Goodwin began to see a possible new market to exploit, new
opportunities for fame and fortune.
With time
Goodwin shifted from sympathy, to excusing, to outright support for the radical
right. Yet Goodwin isn’t a fanatic. He’s more dangerous than that. He will say
whatever he thinks will resonate with whatever audience he wants to rile up. It
increasingly seems there is nothing he won’t say, no foghorn he won’t scream
through, if he thinks it will get him more views and paying Substack
subscribers. He’s an opportunist extremist.
Following
His Own Blueprint
The great
irony of Goodwin’s career trajectory is that his own academic analysis of the
far right can be used to describe his activism.
Goodwin
spent many years analysing what drives people towards the far right. He worked
to understand the messaging that resonates most with people susceptible to this
form of politics. As such Goodwin’s rise to a major figure on the British
radical right – or “popular extremist” to use a term from his earlier work –
can actually be understood as him following the successful blueprint he
identified and warned about. He knows which buttons to push, which narratives
will cause maximum anger, which topics to highlight and which to avoid. He has
essentially reverse-engineered his own research to build his own career as a
radical right influencer.
Race and
Nation
While
Goodwin’s rightward shift has been evident for some years, it has certainly
accelerated. During last year’s racist riots – the most widespread outbreak of
far-right violence in the postwar period – the extent of Goodwin’s
radicalisation became evident. In a post on his Substack titled “What did you
expect?”, he framed the horrifying violence, which included people trying to
set alight a hotel with asylum seekers inside, as an understandable reaction to
“mass immigration”. He described people at the riots as, “ordinary people, who
feel like they are losing their country”, who were trying to, “exercise their
voice”.
He also
emphasised that the Cardiff-born murderer was “the son of immigrants from
Rwanda”, in a clear attempt to frame the horrifying attack as a result of
immigration. When challenged about his comments on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze it
became clear that there is increasingly a racial element to Goodwin’s
conception of nationhood.
Similarly,
in a 2024 Substack article about Britain’s “demographic CRISIS”, he warned that
“the share of the country’s population that identifies as “white British” is
forecast to become a minority group around the year 2070,” and that “those who
oppose these great inflows and do not embrace the rapid ethnic change they
cause wonder why it is that politicians seem unable to stop them”. At no point
does he explain why the decline of the number of “white British” people due to
a rise in the number of “black British” or “Asian British” people is a problem.
It’s presented as self-evident.
Goodwin’s
slippage towards a racial conception of Britishness was laid bare when he
claimed on GB News: “More than 50% of social housing in London is now occupied
by people who are not British. This is not acceptable.” In reality, the
percentage is actually about 14%. Goodwin’s correction relied on the fact that
48% of social housing in London goes to families headed by people who were not
born in Britain, many of whom are naturalised citizens. All this hints at a
conception of nationhood based on birth and race.
Islam and
Muslims
Among
Goodwin’s more extreme positions are those concerning Islam and Muslim
integration. Perhaps this should come as no surprise as his own research showed
that “anti-Muslim sentiment is becoming a key driver of support for these
parties, and that simply talking about reducing the numbers of immigrants or
tightening border security will no longer satisfy the modern PEP [Populist
Extremist Parties] supporter”. Goodwin knew that Islamophobic rhetoric is a
good driver of their support and so could be a possible driver of his own.
Today he
is keen to discredit the very notion of Islamophobia. On his YouTube channel,
he describes Islamophobia as “the flavour of the month amongst the elite
class”. During a debate on GB News, he asked: “Do you not find the term
Islamophobia problematic?”
In one of
his recent videos, he said: “The reason this matters, perhaps to people like
you watching this video, is because I think we can all sense that terms and
social norms like ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’, ‘xenophobia’ or even ‘hate’
and ‘far right’ are now being inflated, are being widened, are being ballooned
by the expert class to try and shut down discussion about issues they either
think are not important or might challenge their power and their interpretation
of our society.”
This is a
far cry from the earlier Goodwin who argued in The Guardian that “Islamophobia
does not only affect British Muslims; it plays directly into the hands of
extremists who claim that western societies will never accept Islam and its
followers”. As recently as 2013 he argued that “few serious commentators cling
to the bankrupt idea that Islamophobia is not an issue or is the product of
oversensitive British Muslims”. It’s unclear whether this is an admission that
he is no longer a “serious commentator.”
The New
Elite
In
addition to trumpeting the dangers of Islam and the Muslim community, Goodwin
also regularly lays blame at the feet of the elite, or his newly defined “new
elite”. Here we can also see him drawing from his own research into what makes
far-right politics successful. Goodwin once wrote that “mainstream parties are
lumped into a single ‘corrupt’ and ‘out-of-touch’ elite and are ‘all the
same’.” They are attacked “for focusing on obsolete issues, while at the same
time suppressing political issues associated with the real conflict between
national identity and multiculturalism”.
Goodwin
said that populist radical-right parties “portray themselves as outsiders in
the party system, as underdog parties that represent the true voice of a
‘silent majority’, and as the only organizations willing to address sensitive
issues such as immigration and the integration of Muslims”. Today it would be
hard to find a better articulation of Goodwin’s own reactionary and
opportunistic rhetoric on his GB News show, or the strategy of Farage’s Reform
UK.
More
recently, in his 2023 book Values, Voice and Virtue, Goodwin posits the
existence of a “new elite”, which he defines as people from Oxbridge or Russell
Group universities living in big cities and part of the professional and
managerial class. What unites them is a set of socially liberal or even
radically “woke” ideas. Goodwin seeks to redefine the elite from people with
actual power to people with “radically progressive cultural values”.
It’s
perhaps unsurprising that much of the blame for the emergence of the so-called
“new elite” is placed upon “the Oxbridge and Russell Group college system”, the
same institutions that didn’t give him the recognition he felt he deserved.
While he
accepts in passing that “old elite – clearly – still exist”, he fails to
convincingly explain why the values of the new elite are somehow more powerful
than the money and actual power of the old. For example, one section in society
that seems to generally avoid his ire is the financial sector. Perhaps this can
be explained by his sideline in providing speeches to practically every major
financial institution in the world. His website proudly lists engagements at
UBS, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Asset Management and Santander amongst dozens of
other financial institutions.
Polling
as a Weapon
Goodwin
often employs polling to buttress his reactionary politics and provide an air
of scholarly legitimacy to his activism.
Yet in
2013, in an article for The Guardian, he warned readers that one of the
problems faced by those opposed to Islamophobia:
are
unhelpful opinion polls, which either attempt to show how many Muslims
sympathise with terrorists, or how non-Muslims don’t like Muslims. They might
be driven by good intentions but often inflame tensions and provide new
ammunition to extremists. And worse, they are often inaccurate.
He
continued: “If we are going to explore these kinds of questions then we need to
make sure that we do it properly, with good data and in a way that does not
inadvertently legitimise the narratives of extremists.” He even went as far as
suggesting such polls should be subject to peer review.
Sadly,
Goodwin appears to have forgotten this lesson. In a recent Substack article
titled “Shocking: what British Muslims think”, he apocalyptically writes about
exactly the sort of polling he previously warned about. Only now he describes
it as “compulsory reading for anybody and everybody who has a serious interest
in the future of Britain and the West more generally”.
Since
morphing into a radical-right extremist, Goodwin has regularly used polling to
evidence his divisive, reactionary and apocalyptic positions. Yet reliability
has proved something of an issue for his own company, PeoplePolling, which
finished bottom of the list for accuracy at last year’s general election.
Hypocrisy
Among
Goodwin’s hypocrisies, there is one more egregious than any other. Like much of
the far right, Goodwin presents himself as a champion and defender of free
speech. In one of his alarmist YouTube videos, he warns that the new Labour
government “just declared war on free speech and free expression”.
Under the
previous Conservative administration, Goodwin fought to get the Higher
Education Free Speech Act passed, which created a legal requirement for
universities to promote and protect free speech on campus.
Despite
claiming to be a fervent believer in free speech and a defender of academic
freedom, Goodwin is also a vocal supporter of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Last year
he tweeted:
I just
spent 4 days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the
West. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No
mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve
just landed back in the UK.
In an
interview with a Hungarian news website, he said: “The British elite often
portrays Hungary as a country in violation of EU laws, regulations and
standards. But I think their country is just resisting the pressure to impose a
liberal agenda represented by a narrow minority of Western countries.”
Goodwin
has also spoken at several events organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium,
an Orbán government-aligned and funded private educational institution.
Hungary
is a country where teachers have been fired for participating in acts of civil
disobedience and where tear gas has been used against students protesting
legislation to further centralise the public education system. Orbán’s
government has limited press freedom and facilitated media takeovers by
investors sympathetic to his party, Fidesz. Goodwin seems more than comfortable
to ignore all of this and praise the country while presenting himself as a
defender of free speech and academic freedom at home.
A Danger
It is
easy to look at Goodwin’s radicalisation as an amusing story of how ego and
self-interest can drive someone to destroy their reputation. How a sad
desperation for recognition can make some people do and say anything. A warning
about the radicalising potential of the endless hunt for clicks and
subscribers.
But
Goodwin’s willingness to do or say anything that will advance his own career
actually makes him more dangerous. It doesn’t matter if he believes the
reactionary and extreme things he says. It’s not particularly relevant if there
is genuine conviction behind his increasingly irate and angry social media
posts.
Goodwin’s
years of work to understand what makes far-right parties successful, and what
angers their supporters to the point of activism, mean he knows which drums to
bang, which topics to focus on, which language to use, which communities to
target. The result is that he is now one of the most effective radical-right
figures in the UK.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
