Matt Goodwin was once a serious academic, who sought to understand the drivers of far-right extremism and warn about its dangers.
He has since morphed into something very different. Over the past few years, Goodwin has established himself as one of the most influential radical right voices in British media. In November 2025, he was appointed honorary president of Reform UK’s student wing and, on 27 January, was announced as the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary byelection.
Goodwin now seeks to exploit the same far-right messaging he once critiqued and analysed. If elected, he will become one of the most extreme MPs in the House of Commons, perhaps second only to Rupert Lowe.
His candidacy has been supported by activists to the right of Reform, including Tommy Robinson, and it isn’t hard to see why the prospect of Goodwin becoming an MP might excite them.
While Goodwin often caters his message to the audience in front of him, his thought consistently displays a number of far-right themes. As well as holding ethnicity to be an important part of national identity, he suggests Muslims are a threat to western society, considers Tommy Robinson worthy of praise, and describes Donald Trump in glowing terms.
National identity
Goodwin most clearly expressed his view of British and English national identity in an interview with Spectator editor Michael Gove in June 2025. In Goodwin’s conceptualisation, “Britishness” is “a state identity that has been imposed… on the top”, while “Englishness” is “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations”. Thus, British and English identity are different and distinct.
From this, it appears Goodwin believes that immigrants and the descendents of immigrants cannot be English even if they have lived in the country their entire lives, but can still be British. Confusingly, however, he has also written about British identity in exclusionary terms. In November, he suggested that people from black, Asian and other immigrant backgrounds are not necessarily British, commenting: “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’.”
The same month, Goodwin also suggested that diversity undermines nationhood. He told the YouTuber Andrew Gold that “2063 is the year in which white Britons become a minority in the country” saying this matters because “more diverse societies are also less trusting societies”. Goodwin went on: “You end up basically not being in your home anymore, you end up in a sort of cheap two-star motel where you don’t really know who’s living next door… That’s not really a nation anymore, that’s more like an airport lounge.”
For Goodwin, then, people from ethnic minorities who have lived here their entire lives are definitely not English and possibly not British either. In his view, increasing diversity undermines the very existence of the nation.
Anti-Muslim hatred
While Goodwin was once keen to challenge anti-Muslim hatred, he now propagates it. In an interview with the far-right American commentator and Tommy Robinson ally Don Keith in April 2025, Goodwin declared that “if we were serious” and had “a Trump-style government in this country” then “we’d have an immediate freeze on all immigration for at least, I think, five to ten years” and, in particular, “an immediate ban on all migration from predominantly Islamic nations”.
He repeated this position when speaking to Michael Gove in June 2025. “We need to dramatically lower, if not stop, migration into the UK from predominantly Islamic nations,” he said, adding: “If we maintain on the current direction of travel, Michael, it’s not just one in four people in this country [who] will be following Islam by 2100, it’s closer to one in three among the under 40s.” In the same interview, he also questioned whether Islam is compatible with western democracy, saying: “That is a question that is going to hang over British and Western politics for the next 20, 30, 40 years.”
More recently, on 6 January, Goodwin appeared on Harry Cole’spodcast, where he pronounced that he would “like to see Reform come forward with a detailed policy around how we’re going to tackle the Islamisation of British society”. He added that “we have to have this conversation about how we’re going to take on the Islamification of areas of our country”.
Given these views, it isn’t hard to understand why, speaking on GB News in April 2025, Goodwin praised Renaud Camus as a “very important and influential French intellectual”. Camus is the originator of the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that elites are colluding to replace white Europeans with Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.
All of this is a far cry from the Goodwin of old. From 2011 to 2015, he sat on the government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred. When he resigned from this position in 2015, Goodwin said their work had “lacked support from central government”, warned that “it feels as though we have gone backwards” in “tackling anti-Muslim hatred”, and explained: “Islamophobia does not only affect British Muslims; it plays directly into the hands of extremists who claim that western societies will never accept Islam and its followers.”
Tommy Robinson
While Nigel Farage has said the serial criminal and anti-Muslim extremist Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) will never be welcome in Reform, Goodwin has taken a far more sympathetic view.
When he spoke to Don Keith in April 2025, Goodwin was asked about his views on Lennon. After commenting that “in some respects we’re quite similar” and that he understands where Lennon is “coming from”, Goodwin explained: “My line on Tommy Robinson has always been that had the state and had the establishment listened to what he was saying when he first emerged in 2009… then I think we would have avoided some of the problems that we ran into as a society over the last decade.”
Goodwin went on to defend Nigel Farage’s eschewal of Lennon, but only in pragmatic, electoral terms. “Saying nice things about Tommy Robinson and turning this into a debate about Tommy Robinson isn’t going to get you [i.e. Reform] to 32% at the national vote in the UK,” he told Keith, adding that if people have heard of Lennon “they’ve probably been influenced and swayed… and they’ve probably got a negative view”.
Donald Trump
Like many in Reform, Goodwin is also a fan of the far-right, conspiracy theorist US President Donald Trump. “I think Americans really need to understand how important President Trump’s re-election was for lots of people in Europe,” he told Don Keith in April 2025, adding: “I completely accept it allowed you guys [Americans] to breathe a sigh of relief, but for many of us here in the UK and in Europe it was really critically important because it allowed us to see what a fightback looks like, what the counter cultural policies look like.”
Goodwin again expressed his admiration for Trump on 5 June 2025. Writing for GB News he said Trump “has proved we do not need to submit to managed decline” and praised him for “large-scale deportations”, before concluding: “This government could do what Trump has done. It could say no to managed decline. It could say no to open borders and it could say no to the international liberal consensus that has manifestly failed. But will it?”
Tax women without children
In a 2023 blog post, Goodwin suggested that people who don’t have children should be taxed as a form of punishment, as the Independent revealed last week.
He made a number of proposals to reinforce the family including: “Switching child benefit to incentivise families to have more children. Introducing a ‘negative child benefit’ tax for those who don’t have offspring.”
Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell explained that such a policy “would punish millions of women and strip them of their basic dignity to choose”.
Robert Jenrick
While Goodwin has been willing to describe Tommy Robinson and Donald Trump in positive terms, he has been disparaging about Robert Jenrick. This is rather awkward for Reform, given that Jenrick’s defection to the party in January means that, if Goodwin is elected, they will become parliamentary colleagues.
“The thing with Jenrick,” Goodwin explained in May 2025, is that “you can take an injection for weight loss, but you can’t take an injection for personality”. He went on: “I think there are two things with Jenrick. One is there is no charisma. The second is he’s not as strong as he thinks he is. If you look at all of his social media metrics, they’re not actually that good. For somebody who’s supposed to be an insurgent politician on the right, he’s not connecting. He’s a Westminster story.”
Goodwin was similarly damning of Jenrick when he spoke to Andrew Gold in November 2025, referring to him as a “total joke”.
Goodwin’s nomination as Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton proved a matter of excitement for those even further to the right than Farage’s party.
Tommy Robinson publicly backed Goodwin, telling his followers to “Vote for Matt”.
Young Bob, a close ally of Robinson, has similarly said that “Matt Goodwin represents the serious right wing direction Reform should be taking but currently is not”.
Meanwhile, Connor Tomlinson – a far-right YouTuber, who believes that no one of Pakistani heritage born in the UK should be an MP – has supported Goodwin, writing on X on 4 February: “I believe Matt is sincere; and if we want Reform to be better ahead of forming the next government, then it benefits us to have Matt Goodwin as an MP – possibly, even as Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary.”
Reform’s announcement of Goodwin as its candidate in Gorton and Denton came three days after the party’s chairman, David Bull, emailed its members, inviting them to stand for selection. “We have an enormous wealth of talent in our party and I’m excited to see who comes forward,” Bull wrote.
Any member wishing to put their hat in the ring had to cough up £125 for the privilege, before the party decided to go with an established far-right commentator instead.
Reform’s selection of Goodwin highlights how comfortable the party is with anti-Muslim hatred and ethnic conceptions of national identity. It also shows Farage’s party is happy for parliamentary candidates to speak about Tommy Robinson in positive terms.
In 2011, Goodwin warned that “the rise of populist extremism is one of the most pressing challenges facing European democracies”. He explained that “populist extremist parties” reject the “principle of human equality, and hence advocate exclusionary policies towards immigrants and minority groups” and “adhere to a populist anti-establishment strategy that is deeply critical of the mainstream parties and is ambiguous if not hostile towards liberal representative democracy”.
The Goodwin of 2011 would be deeply alarmed by the Goodwin of 2026 and the possibility of him becoming an MP.
Prefer to listen? Click the play button to hear the audio version. Harry Shukman Reform UK is staffed by oddballs and enigmas, but none odder…
