Matthew Goodwin

Matthew James Goodwin (born December 1981) is a British academic who is professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.

His publications include National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (with Roger Eatwell) and Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.

he serves on the Social Mobility Commission.

Goodwin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics and contemporary history from the University of Salford in 2003 and obtained a Master of Arts degree in political science from the University of Western Ontario in 2004.

He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree under the supervision of Roger Eatwell at the University of Bath in 2007.

Goodwin was an associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham from 2010 to 2015, a research fellow at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester from 2008 to 2010, and, between 2010 and 2020, associate fellow at Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) where he authored research reports on the rise of populism, Euroscepticism ahead of the Brexit vote, the different political tribes of Europe, and the future of Europe.

In 2014, aged 33, Goodwin was awarded the Richard Rose Prize by the Political Studies Association, which is given to one early-career academic each year for their contribution to research.

Since 2015, Goodwin has been professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.

Goodwin is a former senior fellow for the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, and was the founding director of the Centre for UK Prosperity within the Legatum Institute.

Goodwin is on the advisory panel of the Free Speech Union, a group that seeks to "counter Twitter mobs that drown out opinions they dislike".

He has served as specialist adviser to the House of Commons Education Select Committee on left-behind pupils and has given evidence to a Public Bill Committee on the importance of defending academic freedom in universities.

Goodwin's research and writings focus on British politics, radical-right politics, and Euroscepticism.

He has written for the New Statesman, The Guardian, Prospect magazine, the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Financial Times, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, UnHerd and Spiked.

He has appeared on BBC shows The Westminster Hour, Any Questions, Moral Maze, Newsnight and Politics Live, Channel 4 News, GB News and Planet Normal.

A major theme of Goodwin's work has been to explain what he calls "the realignment" of British politics, which has seen the Labour Party becoming more dependent on the liberal,

metropolitan middle-class for its votes while the Conservative Party appeals increasingly to working-class, non-university educated voters in former Labour heartlands (the "red wall").

Goodwin recommends that political parties "lean into" this realignment, by moving "left on economics and right on culture".

On 27 May 2017, Goodwin predicted that the UK Labour Party would not reach 38 per cent of the vote in the 2017 general election and said he would eat his book if they did.

Labour did (the party won 40.0% of the popular vote) and, on 10 June, Goodwin chewed one page out of his book, live on Sky News.

Goodwin spoke at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference, where he described the Conservative Party as in a "prolonged death spiral".

Goodwin told CNN that conservatives needed to "decide who they are and what they want to be".

For The Atlantic, Helen Lewis wrote that Goodwin gave "a typically doomy speech", which "segued into 10 minutes of pure populist beat poetry".

Gerry Hassan wrote that "Goodwin is the populist right's academic of choice, but it seems to have escaped his notice that in the past half century right-wing Tory Governments have been in office for three-quarters of the time."

David Aaronovitch described Goodwin's speech as one of the two most "politically coherent" of the conference, calling him "the politics professor turned political entrepreneur".

Explaining his decision to participate in the conference, Goodwin wrote "I’m not a member of the Conservative Party. And unless something changes I don’t currently plan on voting Conservative at the next election."

He explained that his decision was because "one of the most interesting and important debates in politics right now is where conservatism goes next – not only here in Britain but globally."

Others have characterized Goodwin as a "populist academic", stating that he turned from observer into participant, becoming an apologist for populism.

In 2023, the New Statesman named Goodwin as the 43rd most powerful right-wing British political figure of the year.

Goodwin and his National Populism coauthor Roger Eatwell have argued about the USA that political polarization has been caused by "an increasing fixation or near-total obsession among Democrats and the liberal left with race, gender and ‘diversity’".

In 2018, Goodwin along with other commentators including Eric Kaufmann, Claire Fox, Trevor Phillips and David Aaronovitch was due to take part in an event titled "Is Rising Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West?"

Some researchers argued that the event would encourage "normalisation of far right ideas" and criticised the framing of the title; the debate was retitled "Immigration and Diversity Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy?"

According to Huw Davies and Sheena MacRae, Goodwin's "concerns about wokeism are a recurrent theme in his output".

Goodwin has described "wokeism" as "a pseudo-religion".

He has acted as an adviser to the Conservative Party and in the 2022 Conservative Party leadership contest supported "anti-woke campaigner" Kemi Badenoch, referring to her as ‘one of the most interesting Conservatives in British politics for a very long time’.

He supports the Conservative government's plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and has advised the party to raise “the salience of cultural issues”.

Malik argues that Goodwin now advocates a politics that a decade earlier he would have described as "toxic".

When the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Sewell Report) argued that structural racism didn't exist in the UK, Goodwin claimed this "dismantles the woke mob’s central claim that we are living in a fundamentally racist society".

The morning after the Conservatives under Boris Johnson won the 2019 general election Goodwin tweeted "it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity & culture."

Kenan Malik wrote that this view was based on an assumption the working class are socially conservative, and "the trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation", citing examples such as attitudes to sexuality, premarital sex and interracial relationships.