No reputable publisher would touch it
Matt Goodwin, or “MattGPT” as he will be forever known, was once a respected academic. He built his reputation on exploring far right populism. But his attempt to become a right wing populist has proved to be anything but popular.
Goodwin is becoming a national joke.
He is what passes for an intellectual in Reform UK circles. That bar is pretty low—but Goodwin’s latest book, Suicide of a Nation—Immigration, Islam, Identity, has spectacularly failed to clear it.
Goodwin had to resort to vanity publishing—what a blow to his enormous ego that no reputable publisher would touch it.
His diatribe against immigration is based on falsehoods, misleading claims and unreferenced assertions.
Goodwin’s opponents are dwelling gleefully on the book’s many flaws. But even those in his own camp are relishing the sight of him squirming and throwing tantrums.
It was on GB News that Goodwin was destroyed by writer and campaigner Andy Twelves who confronted Goodwin with a litany of his errors and unsubstantiated claims.
Twelves suggested that these errors were the result of AI “hallucinations”. Goodwin carelessly left ChatGPT URLs in some of his footnotes.
When challenged, Goodwin ranted that he used AI only “to obtain datasets”, wrongly claiming this is standard practice.
Twelves also claims that “it’s not just factual errors in this book, but basic spelling and grammar ones”. Why should such a great intellect bother with such lowly matters?
Goodwin also includes quotations from the Roman statesman Cicero, philosopher Roger Scruton, neoliberal economist
Friedrich Hayek and others that appear to have been misattributed—or simply made up.
Goodwin breezily refers to various academics who are not the renowned scholars he claims them to be, and do not support his arguments.
Ex-Tory Tim Montgomerie is now a prominent member of Reform UK. He posted on X, “@reformparty_uk should now fully investigate Mr Goodwin’s book and if there are repeated examples of factual error he should be removed from the candidates list. We need our future MPs to be trustworthy and credible.”
Of course, the idea that Reform UK candidates are trustworthy is hilarious given how many have been dropped for Nazi cosplaying. But if Goodwin is too dodgy for Montgomerie, he really is in trouble.
Ben Sixsmith’s article in The Critic magazine, Suicide of an Author’s Credibility, dismisses Goodwin’s “very bad book” as a work that doles out “slop” to readers.
Mary Harrington of Unherd dubbed Goodwin as a “slopagandist”. Suicide of a Nation, she wrote is less a book and more of “a tranche of internet”.
Goodwin used ChatGPT to parade the knowledge you might get from reading books, without the inconvenience of actually having to read them.
He insists that the main argument of his book is robust. But if it was, he wouldn’t have needed to make stuff up.
England is “committing suicide” by allowing immigration, Goodwin raves. The “slow replacement” he describes is a not-so subtle spin on the fascist Great Replacement Theory.
He rants that white Britons are now a minority in many cities and will gradually disappear altogether in a few decades. “We” are about to be engulfed by a “foreign-born tide”.
Goodwin points his imperious finger at primary school children—and particularly toddlers. The rising number of children with English as a second language is “not evolution, it is displacement”—that displacement word again.
It should be noted, because Goodwin doesn’t, that many children with English as a Second Language are also fluent English speakers—an achievement rather than a threat to the fabric of society.
Migration is being encouraged by pesky elites who “followed the exact playbook outlined by the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci—they captured the institutions”.
Maybe Goodwin should have asked ChatGPT what Gramsci actually argued.
In Goodwin’s mirror world, elites are using institutions like the civil service, universities and schools, and the creative industries to privilege migrants, support trans+ rights and sacrifice free speech to protect over-sensitive minorities.
The elites are in thrall to something Goodwin defines as “suicidal empathy”—I counted 74 mentions.
Suicidal empathy is a “moral virus” and a “twisted worldview” based on “unconditional compassion that always favours outsiders at the expense of your own people”.
Quite why or how our elites abandoned patriotism and became empathetic is not, of course, explained.
Goodwin wants to dismiss the idea of Britain as a “nation of immigrants”. He is simply erasing the history of the enslaved people, the Irish, the Jews and the workers from the British Empire who have all shaped British society.
If Goodwin visited a hospital, a care home, a school, or had a meal out he would know that our public services and our economy depend on migrant workers.
As Robert Winder writes in his book, Bloody Foreigners, “All the rhetoric that seeks to depict modern immigration into Britain as a hazard, putting at risk a thousand year way of life, plays false with the historical truth—Britain has always accommodated strangers.”
As Winder rightly says, “Immigration is an old, old story, one that defines the texture of British life”. Migration is not the exception—it is the norm of British history.
Goodwin wants us to see brown babies as a threat to society while demanding white women produce more babies to resupply the depleted labour market.Goodwin quotes population expert Paul Morland as saying that nations that cease to believe in themselves stop reproducing and eventually cease to exist.
What Morland actually writes is that nations that fail to “nurture high‑fertility communities will eventually cease to exist as viable nations”.
We gave up the idea of lying back and thinking of England a long time ago. “Believing in Britain” is not going to boost birth rates—so the far right will always threaten our reproductive rights.
Racism needs misogyny.
Goodwin was very cross about a Women Against The Far Right letter published in the Guardian newspaper last September that rebutted far right lies about violence against women. Let’s hope he hated the massive Together demonstration against the far right.
Goodwin is bragging about his nasty little book reaching number two on the Amazon sales chart. He doesn’t realise this is people hate-buying it.
Goodwin—we are laughing at you, not with you.
