Matthew
James Goodwin (born December 1981) is a British political commentator and
former academic whose last academic post was as professor of politics in the
School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, which
he left in July 2024. His publications include National Populism: The Revolt
Against Liberal Democracy (with Roger Eatwell) and Values, Voice and Virtue:
The New British Politics. From September 2022 to 2023, he served on the Social
Mobility Commission.
Goodwin has become known for increasingly
right-wing views and has a large following on X and Substack. Some critics have
argued that he has become an apologist for populism.
Others have characterized Goodwin as a
"populist academic", stating that he turned from observer into
participant, becoming an apologist for populism. James Ball argues that it was
around 2016, with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's election as US
president, that "Goodwin’s public persona began to transform from that of
someone explaining how to counter populist and far-right movements to someone
explaining them, justifying their ends, or acting as something of an apologist
for them". In 2023, the New Statesman named Goodwin as the 43rd most powerful
right-wing British political figure of the year.
During the 2024 United Kingdom riots that
followed the 2024 Southport stabbing, Goodwin criticised commentators who
labelled the groups engaged in the violence as "far right", writing
on X that there had been a "concerted & most likely coordinated effort
by the elite class to inflate 'far right' to stigmatise & silence millions
of ordinary people who object to mass immigration and its effects".
Goodwin praised Hungary, which he described as having "no crime",
"no homeless people", "no riots" and "no unrest".
Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie called Goodwin's posts “incendiary”
and ITV News' Joel Hills asked "Matt, are you still at the University of
Kent? I ask because it’s so hard to imagine a serious academic publishing
something like this. Robert Ford, with whom Goodwin wrote Revolt on the Right
in 2014, had by August 2024 "ended contact with Goodwin", saying
"I tried for several years to reason with him on this but to no avail.
Once I could see where this was heading I cut ties and became a more public
critic".
On
diversity, "wokeism" and racism
Goodwin and
his National Populism coauthor Roger Eatwell have argued about the United
States that political polarization has been caused by "an increasing
fixation or near-total obsession among Democrats and the liberal left with
race, gender and 'diversity'". In 2018, Goodwin along with other
commentators including Eric Kaufmann, Claire Fox, Trevor Phillips, and David
Aaronovitch was due to take part in an event titled "Is Rising Ethnic
Diversity a Threat to the West?" Some researchers argued that the event
would encourage "normalisation of far right ideas" and criticised the
framing of the title; the debate was retitled "Immigration and Diversity
Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy?"
According to Huw Davies and Sheena MacRae,
Goodwin's "concerns about wokeism are a recurrent theme in his
output". Goodwin has described "wokeism" as "a
pseudo-religion". He has acted as an adviser to the Conservative Party and
in the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election supported
"anti-woke campaigner" Kemi Badenoch, referring to her as "one
of the most interesting Conservatives in British politics for a very long
time". He supports the Conservative government's Rwanda asylum plan, which
would entail deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, and has advised the party to
raise "the salience of cultural issues". Kenan Malik argues that
Goodwin now advocates a politics that a decade earlier he would have described
as "toxic". When the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
(Sewell Report) argued that structural racism did not exist in the UK, Goodwin
claimed this "dismantles the woke mob’s central claim that we are living
in a fundamentally racist society".
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