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Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, holds a visiting professorship at a university centre whose network includes the front publication for a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation. Byline Times can reveal that Goodwin has actively defended, promoted and cited key figures within the network, which encompasses at least five organisations tied to discredited racist pseudoscience.
The University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS), where Goodwin took up a visiting professorship in early 2025, lists the organisations on its website under the heading “Our Network.” All are described as “mission-aligned.”
Among them is Aporia Magazine, exposed by a joint investigation by Hope Not Hate and The Guardian in 2024 – broadcast on Channel 4 News – as the publishing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF).
The HDF is a reconstituted version of the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi endowment established in 1937 in New York which distributed Nazi propaganda and cultivated ties to the Third Reich. For decades the Fund bankrolled research claiming to establish biological hierarchies between racial groups. Those claims have been comprehensively debunked by mainstream genetic science. Neither the Pioneer Fund nor its successor HDF have ever renounced these Nazi origins.
Goodwin’s Own Words
In the run-up to becoming Reform’s first major parliamentary candidate, Goodwin has argued that people from Black, Asian and other immigrant backgrounds are not necessarily British. “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he said in November 2025.
In an interview in June 2025, he described “Englishness” as “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations.” The formulation excludes millions of British citizens.
He has claimed that women in Britain are having children “much too late” and called for a “negative child benefit tax” for those without children, alongside removing income tax for women with two or more. Universities are dominated by “childless women,” he argued, which contributes to “politically correct authoritarianism.”
Over the past decade Goodwin has shifted from liberal critic of the far-right to ‘anti-woke’ nationalist populist. Much commentary has speculated on what drove that transformation. Largely overlooked are his encounters with ‘race science.’
Whatever Happened to Matt Goodwin?
How did Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election go from being a ‘fully-paid up member of the liberal left’ to a Farage disciple, asks David Edgar and Jon Bloomfield
Defending ‘Race Science’
In 2019, Noah Carl was dismissed from his research fellowship at the University of Cambridge. More than 500 academics had signed a letter warning that his work amounted to “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” racist pseudoscience. The university’s own investigation concluded it was “poor scholarship” that “did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity,” and found that Carl had collaborated with far-right extremists.
Carl had published in Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal financed by the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund. One of its founding board members, Otmar von Verschuer, mentored Josef Mengele – the Nazi SS officer known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for his experiments at Auschwitz.
Carl also attended the London Conference on Intelligence, a secretive eugenics gathering at UCL frequented by far-right extremists.
Goodwin disagreed, characterising Cambridge University’s decision as “mob rule… crushing free speech on campus” – rather than engaging with the substance of the concerns.
His long-time collaborator and co-author Eric Kaufmann went further, explicitly defending gene-oriented race-IQ research: “We won’t know whether race really is connected to intelligence until the gene-level relationships that define the two are mapped at some point in the future.” He, too, cast the dismissal as an assault on academic freedom.
Kaufmann’s depiction of this issue as an unresolved scientific question was wrong. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining the consensus among geneticists noted that genetic data “refute the notion of racial substructure for human populations.” The discrete biological races that race science depends on do not exist. The paper also showed that cultural transmission alone can mimic high heritability, collapsing the statistical foundations of the race-IQ thesis.
Noah Carl did not return to academia, but instead joined Pioneer Fund front publication Aporia as a regular contributor in 2022. The following year he graduated to become an Aporia senior editor. That year, Matt Goodwin appeared as a guest on the Aporia podcast to discuss immigration attitudes in Britain, without challenging the programme’s premises. Months earlier, he had told the Triggernometry podcast:
We’re on the cusp of developments with genetic coding and science that are going to be complete gamechangers in how we understand health, medicine, life-expectancy, all of that stuff. So the idea that there are not inherent differences between groups is just going to be completely unsustainable. I mean it already is if you look at the evidence. Over the next 5-10 years it’s just going to look utterly ridiculous as a lot of this research and evidence comes through.
Citing the Godfather of Modern ‘Race Science‘
Goodwin has promoted the leading populariser of ‘race science,’ Charles Murray, at least three times in his public writing. He recommended Murray’s book Coming Apart in two Substack posts and in an UnHerd essay on national populism as early as 2019.
Murray is the co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which famously claims – citing research funded by the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund – that black people are less intelligent than white people, largely for genetic reasons, this explains social inequalities, and nothing can be done about it. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has designated Murray a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
In Coming Apart, Murray applies the framework of The Bell Curve to white America, masking biological arguments