Riot Act: Unpicking Matthew Goodwin’s Arguments in Defence of ‘White Anger’

Of those tossing a blanket of respectability over the racist violence of the past fortnight, one of the most energetic was Matthew Goodwin.

The British academic, an honorary professor at the University of Kent, tried to explain the motives of those involved – some 977 people have been arrested so far; 466 charged, Sky News reported.

In recent years Goodwin has moved from studying the populist right to advocating its policy agenda. In articles, speeches, and his book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, Goodwin has promoted a reactionary form of nationalism. He argues that the UK is run by a liberal elite which has flooded the country with immigrants, changing Britain for the worse. 

After false claims were spread online that the alleged killer of three young girls in Southport was a Muslim asylum seeker, and far-right groups started a pogrom in several towns, Goodwin attempted to legitimise their motivations.

In a piece on his substack on 1 August tilted ‘What did you expect?’, Goodwin painted the ongoing riots as a symptom of public feeling about decades of “mass immigration”.

He made a point of describing the alleged Southport killer, who was born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda, as “the son of immigrants from Rwanda”, in what appeared to be an attempt to emphasise the man’s foreign heritage and fit him into this anti-immigration narrative. Goodwin then listed a series of bad things – from Islamist terrorism, to “grooming” rape gangs, to the supposed failures of multiculturalism, to migrants arriving in small boats – and asserted that people who object to these events are unfairly labelled far-right. 

In a post on X on August 3, he wrote: “Anybody who breaks the law should be arrested. But what you are also witnessing in the UK right now is 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.” 

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past decade or two will know that this is false as these issues are discussed regularly in print and broadcast media, and are a major part of Government policy.

Far from being bullied out of public life, “concerns” about immigration have dominated British politics, especially since Brexit. And while some have criticised anti-immigration politics as cruel or xenophobic, Goodwin’s sketch of a censorious Britain is a distortion of reality, designed to serve a political function.  

The ‘What did you expect?’ article is an exercise in grouping unrelated events together to create an impression of association. But the professor fails to join the dots.

Goodwin neglects to say whether he thinks being an immigrant, or a child of immigrants, or a Muslim, makes one more likely to commit a crime. So for all his urging of candour, he declines to voice his opinion. The result is a piece of shady innuendo, which is the opposite of an “open and honest debate”. 

Another Goodwin method is to cherry-pick data from opinion polls to suit a narrative. In a substack piece titled ‘What Brits REALLY think about the immigration riots and protests’, Goodwin accused YouGov of trying to “downplay some of the key findings” of a poll it published on 6 August. Goodwin called it “very significant” that 67% of respondents blamed the riots on “immigration policy in recent years”. 

“Significance” is in the eye of the beholder. For context, 88% pinned responsibility on the people taking part, followed by social media (86%), far-right groups (74%) and the news media (69%), with Goodwin’s favoured answer coming fifth.

These numbers are a combination of “a great deal” and “a fair amount” of responsibility. So if we stick to “a great deal”, it’s 71% for the rioters themselves, 56% for social media, and 53% for far-right groups, while immigration policy drops to just 36%. And pollsters didn’t ask people what they meant by “immigration policy in recent years” being responsible for anti-immigrant violence, which is open to interpretation. 

As this example shows, opinion polls are notoriously easy to exploit, from the way a question is asked to how the results are reported. But it wouldn’t matter if 100% of the public thought something – this wouldn’t make it true, let alone wise or moral.

This concept of a single and authentic “will of the people”, and of adherence to its wishes as the measure of democracy, is a hangover from Brexit and the populism Goodwin hopes to revive.

Incidentally, have we not just had a rather big democratic test of public opinion, with the landslide election of a Labour Party critical of Conservative posturing on immigration? Not so, according to the professor, who reads the election (with its Conservative swing to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK), as a verdict on the failure of “elite” Conservatives to tackle immigration. 

The author of a book called National Populism, Goodwin’s real contribution to the field is to deploy its rhetorical methods so blatantly. If one were to take Goodwin’s work and replace the words “many ordinary people think” with “I think”, we would often be much closer to the truth.

Goodwin spent the riots in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, (“a conservative country criticised by elites across the West”), where, he writes: “I saw no crime… no riots… no mass immigration”. Here’s a question: What does “mass immigration” look like?

On Thursday, he took it upon himself to define who is and is not English, telling a journalist of Asian descent: “I think you can be British and English in terms of nationality but not English in terms of ethnicity.”

On Saturday, comparing responses to “Black Lives Matter rioting and protests” with the post-Southport riots, Goodwin lamented that “today, it’s apparently illegitimate to ask what lies behind white anger”. 

Volunteering for the role of “white anger” interpreter has its perks. Far from being silenced for his views, Goodwin claims he has been doing “a lot of international media”.

When approached by Byline Times, Goodwin noted that the opinion he expressed was shared by others, again citing the YouGov polling that showed that more than two-thirds of all British people, some 67% blame “recent immigration policy” as having contributed to the violence.

Goodwin further argued that people like Tommy Robinson – who was accused of stoking tensions while holidaying abroad – and Nigel Farage “also reflect this underlying anger over mass immigration”.

“Indeed, as my own research has shown, wanting to stop the boats and reduce legal immigration are the top two drivers of support for Nigel Farage and Reform,” he told Byline Times.