THE OPPORTUNIST EXTREMIST

Joe Mulhall 

Writing for Chatham House in 2011, Matthew Goodwin asked, “What drives some citizens to abandon the mainstream in favour of populist extremists?” Since then, he has gone on to answer the question himself.

Today, Goodwin is one of the most influential radical right figures in the country. His reactionary Substack has over 69,000 subscribers, he has his own show on GB News, and he is a vocal supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, offering strategy advice and whipping up crowds at the party’s conferences. Fulfilling a long-held dream, he is now a well-known media commentator, finally receiving the attention he always felt he deserved.

This wasn’t always the case. Goodwin was once a serious academic working to understand the drivers of far-right extremism, and for most of his career relatively liberal, seen by colleagues as hard working, bright and ambitious. He produced several books and articles on the British National Party and the wider far right. He even sat on the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group and wrote impassioned articles for The Guardian denouncing Islamophobia and warning of the dangers of far-right politics.

Sadly, this has all changed, and in recent years his rightward shift has seen him become a fully-fledged radical-right activist.

Radicalisation

Some have argued that Goodwin became radicalised after he “went native” or “drank the Kool-Aid” while studying UKIP for his two co-authored books, Revolt on the Right and UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics. The argument goes that his time with Nigel Farage and other prominent UKIP figures actually served to redraw Matthew Goodwin.

The truth is more complex. Looking at Goodwin’s earlier academic work, it is possible to discern a sympathy for the concerns of those who voted for far and radical-right parties. He has long argued that their anger was justified, or at least understandable, and that their supporters had been ignored by mainstream politicians. This certainly isn’t a radical position and has been argued by many in social science and beyond for decades. The difference with Goodwin is that he’s gone from sympathy for the voters, to sympathy with the far-right parties preying on them.

Yet there is another common thread that can be traced from his earliest days in academia through to today, one that explains his seismic political shift better than anything else. After speaking with a range of former colleagues and academics who have worked with or known Goodwin over the years, there emerged one common point. From his earliest days in academia, he was ruthlessly ambitious, supposedly motivated more by personal advancement than a love for or interest in the topic that he researched.

Goodwin’s political shift is perhaps best explained by his desire for recognition. Numerous former colleagues recall his frustration at the speed of his advancement and a growing bitterness at those he blamed for it. This might seem odd for someone who gained a professorship in his mid-thirties, but it was recognition from the golden circle of British universities – Oxbridge and the major London institutions, rather than his employer at the University of Kent – that he most desired. Other colleagues recall Goodwin’s difficulty with taking criticism – necessary in the peer reviewed world of academia – with one calling him “aggressive, brittle and deeply insecure”.

He allegedly felt that his politics, described by numerous colleagues as “working class Tory” at the time, resulted in discrimination against him. The “liberal elites” at these institutions were apparently preventing him from getting the jobs he deserved. This may go some way to explaining why he has now published two polemics about intellectual narrow mindedness in academia: Values, Voice and Virtue and Bad Education.

The fork in the road came in 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Former colleagues mention that he was appalled by the reaction of his peers to these events, feeling in some cases it was they who had been radicalised, not him. For Goodwin, it appears that this fed into his already existing prejudices. These were the same people – the new elite – who were thwarting his personal ambitions.

Despite being a professor, Goodwin wanted more. Colleagues from this time recall joking that he was always likely to become a TV pundit or MP. Finding that he had impressive access to the right of the Conservative Party and leading figures in UKIP, it seems Goodwin began to see a possible new market to exploit, new opportunities for fame and fortune.

With time Goodwin shifted from sympathy, to excusing, to outright support for the radical right. Yet Goodwin isn’t a fanatic. He’s more dangerous than that. He will say whatever he thinks will resonate with whatever audience he wants to rile up. It increasingly seems there is nothing he won’t say, no foghorn he won’t scream through, if he thinks it will get him more views and paying Substack subscribers. He’s an opportunist extremist.

Following His Own Blueprint

The great irony of Goodwin’s career trajectory is that his own academic analysis of the far right can be used to describe his activism.

Goodwin spent many years analysing what drives people towards the far right. He worked to understand the messaging that resonates most with people susceptible to this form of politics. As such Goodwin’s rise to a major figure on the British radical right – or “popular extremist” to use a term from his earlier work – can actually be understood as him following the successful blueprint he identified and warned about. He knows which buttons to push, which narratives will cause maximum anger, which topics to highlight and which to avoid. He has essentially reverse-engineered his own research to build his own career as a radical right influencer.

Race and Nation

While Goodwin’s rightward shift has been evident for some years, it has certainly accelerated. During last year’s racist riots – the most widespread outbreak of far-right violence in the postwar period – the extent of Goodwin’s radicalisation became evident. In a post on his Substack titled “What did you expect?”, he framed the horrifying violence, which included people trying to set alight a hotel with asylum seekers inside, as an understandable reaction to “mass immigration”. He described people at the riots as, “ordinary people, who feel like they are losing their country”, who were trying to, “exercise their voice”.

He also emphasised that the Cardiff-born murderer was “the son of immigrants from Rwanda”, in a clear attempt to frame the horrifying attack as a result of immigration. When challenged about his comments on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze it became clear that there is increasingly a racial element to Goodwin’s conception of nationhood.

Similarly, in a 2024 Substack article about Britain’s “demographic CRISIS”, he warned that “the share of the country’s population that identifies as “white British” is forecast to become a minority group around the year 2070,” and that “those who oppose these great inflows and do not embrace the rapid ethnic change they cause wonder why it is that politicians seem unable to stop them”. At no point does he explain why the decline of the number of “white British” people due to a rise in the number of “black British” or “Asian British” people is a problem. It’s presented as self-evident.

Goodwin’s slippage towards a racial conception of Britishness was laid bare when he claimed on GB News: “More than 50% of social housing in London is now occupied by people who are not British. This is not acceptable.” In reality, the percentage is actually about 14%. Goodwin’s correction relied on the fact that 48% of social housing in London goes to families headed by people who were not born in Britain, many of whom are naturalised citizens. All this hints at a conception of nationhood based on birth and race.

Islam and Muslims

Among Goodwin’s more extreme positions are those concerning Islam and Muslim integration. Perhaps this should come as no surprise as his own research showed that “anti-Muslim sentiment is becoming a key driver of support for these parties, and that simply talking about reducing the numbers of immigrants or tightening border security will no longer satisfy the modern PEP [Populist Extremist Parties] supporter”. Goodwin knew that Islamophobic rhetoric is a good driver of their support and so could be a possible driver of his own.

Today he is keen to discredit the very notion of Islamophobia. On his YouTube channel, he describes Islamophobia as “the flavour of the month amongst the elite class”. During a debate on GB News, he asked: “Do you not find the term Islamophobia problematic?”

In one of his recent videos, he said: “The reason this matters, perhaps to people like you watching this video, is because I think we can all sense that terms and social norms like ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’, ‘xenophobia’ or even ‘hate’ and ‘far right’ are now being inflated, are being widened, are being ballooned by the expert class to try and shut down discussion about issues they either think are not important or might challenge their power and their interpretation of our society.”

This is a far cry from the earlier Goodwin who argued in The Guardian that “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”. As recently as 2013 he argued that “few serious commentators cling to the bankrupt idea that Islamophobia is not an issue or is the product of oversensitive British Muslims”. It’s unclear whether this is an admission that he is no longer a “serious commentator.”

The New Elite

In addition to trumpeting the dangers of Islam and the Muslim community, Goodwin also regularly lays blame at the feet of the elite, or his newly defined “new elite”. Here we can also see him drawing from his own research into what makes far-right politics successful. Goodwin once wrote that “mainstream parties are lumped into a single ‘corrupt’ and ‘out-of-touch’ elite and are ‘all the same’.” They are attacked “for focusing on obsolete issues, while at the same time suppressing political issues associated with the real conflict between national identity and multiculturalism”.

Goodwin said that populist radical-right parties “portray themselves as outsiders in the party system, as underdog parties that represent the true voice of a ‘silent majority’, and as the only organizations willing to address sensitive issues such as immigration and the integration of Muslims”. Today it would be hard to find a better articulation of Goodwin’s own reactionary and opportunistic rhetoric on his GB News show, or the strategy of Farage’s Reform UK.

More recently, in his 2023 book Values, Voice and Virtue, Goodwin posits the existence of a “new elite”, which he defines as people from Oxbridge or Russell Group universities living in big cities and part of the professional and managerial class. What unites them is a set of socially liberal or even radically “woke” ideas. Goodwin seeks to redefine the elite from people with actual power to people with “radically progressive cultural values”.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that much of the blame for the emergence of the so-called “new elite” is placed upon “the Oxbridge and Russell Group college system”, the same institutions that didn’t give him the recognition he felt he deserved.

While he accepts in passing that “old elite – clearly – still exist”, he fails to convincingly explain why the values of the new elite are somehow more powerful than the money and actual power of the old. For example, one section in society that seems to generally avoid his ire is the financial sector. Perhaps this can be explained by his sideline in providing speeches to practically every major financial institution in the world. His website proudly lists engagements at UBS, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Asset Management and Santander amongst dozens of other financial institutions.

Polling as a Weapon

Goodwin often employs polling to buttress his reactionary politics and provide an air of scholarly legitimacy to his activism.

Yet in 2013, in an article for The Guardian, he warned readers that one of the problems faced by those opposed to Islamophobia:

are unhelpful opinion polls, which either attempt to show how many Muslims sympathise with terrorists, or how non-Muslims don’t like Muslims. They might be driven by good intentions but often inflame tensions and provide new ammunition to extremists. And worse, they are often inaccurate.

He continued: “If we are going to explore these kinds of questions then we need to make sure that we do it properly, with good data and in a way that does not inadvertently legitimise the narratives of extremists.” He even went as far as suggesting such polls should be subject to peer review.

Sadly, Goodwin appears to have forgotten this lesson. In a recent Substack article titled “Shocking: what British Muslims think”, he apocalyptically writes about exactly the sort of polling he previously warned about. Only now he describes it as “compulsory reading for anybody and everybody who has a serious interest in the future of Britain and the West more generally”.

Since morphing into a radical-right extremist, Goodwin has regularly used polling to evidence his divisive, reactionary and apocalyptic positions. Yet reliability has proved something of an issue for his own company, PeoplePolling, which finished bottom of the list for accuracy at last year’s general election.

Hypocrisy

Among Goodwin’s hypocrisies, there is one more egregious than any other. Like much of the far right, Goodwin presents himself as a champion and defender of free speech. In one of his alarmist YouTube videos, he warns that the new Labour government “just declared war on free speech and free expression”.

Under the previous Conservative administration, Goodwin fought to get the Higher Education Free Speech Act passed, which created a legal requirement for universities to promote and protect free speech on campus.

Despite claiming to be a fervent believer in free speech and a defender of academic freedom, Goodwin is also a vocal supporter of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Last year he tweeted:

I just spent 4 days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the West. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.

In an interview with a Hungarian news website, he said: “The British elite often portrays Hungary as a country in violation of EU laws, regulations and standards. But I think their country is just resisting the pressure to impose a liberal agenda represented by a narrow minority of Western countries.”

Goodwin has also spoken at several events organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an Orbán government-aligned and funded private educational institution.

Hungary is a country where teachers have been fired for participating in acts of civil disobedience and where tear gas has been used against students protesting legislation to further centralise the public education system. Orbán’s government has limited press freedom and facilitated media takeovers by investors sympathetic to his party, Fidesz. Goodwin seems more than comfortable to ignore all of this and praise the country while presenting himself as a defender of free speech and academic freedom at home.

A Danger

It is easy to look at Goodwin’s radicalisation as an amusing story of how ego and self-interest can drive someone to destroy their reputation. How a sad desperation for recognition can make some people do and say anything. A warning about the radicalising potential of the endless hunt for clicks and subscribers.

But Goodwin’s willingness to do or say anything that will advance his own career actually makes him more dangerous. It doesn’t matter if he believes the reactionary and extreme things he says. It’s not particularly relevant if there is genuine conviction behind his increasingly irate and angry social media posts.

Goodwin’s years of work to understand what makes far-right parties successful, and what angers their supporters to the point of activism, mean he knows which drums to bang, which topics to focus on, which language to use, which communities to target. The result is that he is now one of the most effective radical-right figures in the UK.