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".[5] 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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