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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.
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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