Matt Goodwin's ideas are a dead end

Revolting on the right

I’m still on my month-long pause (now only a few days to go!), but given the grimly inevitable news that Matt Goodwin has been selected as the Reform candidate in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, I thought it’d be fun to liberate this one that was previously hidden behind the paywall.

(And if you want more of me slagging off Goodwin, you’ll like this one on foreign aid, and this one on the 2024 riots too.)

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Controversial right-wing professor Matthew Goodwin has written a very spicy article for the Telegraph, based on a study he conducted for the Centre for Heterodox Social Science.

“The white British will become a minority group in the UK by the year 2063,” Goodwin says, “The foreign-born and their immediate descendants will become a majority by 2079. And by the end of this century, roughly one in five people will follow the Islamic faith, up from roughly one in 14 today.”

He then goes on to claim that, for example, “unless there is a radical change of policy, the share of the UK population that is white British will fall sharply from just over 70 per cent today to below 34 per cent by the year 2100.”

I found this pretty strange reading. Not because he defines “British” as someone whose parents were both born in the UK – a definition that would seemingly rule out King Charles, and Winston Churchill. And not just because he made some questionable methodological assumptions when modelling the figures.

What makes it weird is that after landing on these numbers, Goodwin doesn’t really explain why it matters. His Telegraph piece warns of “demographic change”, and has a number of graphs showing the fertility rates of different ethnic and religious groups, and so on.

But he doesn’t really explain the implicit ‘why this is bad’ part.

I mean, imagine a similar study making predictions about the state of the climate later this century. After giving the numbers, you would expect it to perhaps explain that climate change is bad because it displaces people, makes it harder to grow crops, leads to more catastrophic weather events, and so on.

But in his article, Goodwin doesn’t really get into this. It’s almost like he’s too nervous to explain clearly why he thinks this “demographic change” would be bad, for some reason.

In fact, the closest he gets to offering an explanation of why he cares is the following couple of sentences:

“We will also witness profound changes in where people were born. A population where most people can trace their roots on these islands back over multiple generations will make way for one in which a majority were born overseas, or born to at least one parent who was born overseas.”

“The ties to our nation – to its sense of history, culture, ways of life and collective memory – will become much weaker.”

I almost wish he would explain his views more clearly. Because even if you make the generous assumption that his modelling is sound and his demographic predictions are accurate, once you try to figure out why we should care about this, Goodwin’s argument doesn’t really make any sense.

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What’s unusual is that Goodwin seems to imagine a world that is strangely static. It is as though the circumstances of our birth forever define us, and that people do not change their opinions or beliefs as their circumstances change.

And I just think this is bollocks.

I mean, for example, my last name is O’Malley. That’s an Irish name – so I know that at some point, some of my ancestors were Irish.

And I can look back not too far in my family history to see this Irish connection. Both of my grandads were born into Irish diaspora communities, in London and Glasgow. And even my parents’ lives were impacted by this heritage: My mum went to a Catholic primary school, rather than one affiliated with the Church of England, and my dad once told me that at the height of the Troubles, my grandma once considered changing the family name to disguise our origins.

However, despite all of this in my backstory, I feel absolutely zero connection with Ireland today.¹ I feel no affinity with Irish culture.² I tick the “White British” box on diversity-monitoring forms. And because I don’t really care about football, the only matches I do watch are the England matches in major tournaments.³

And when I do experience feelings of patriotism, it is obviously towards Britain.⁴

But if you were to follow Matt Goodwin’s static logic, you might half expect me to be someone who enjoys Riverdance, U2 and fundraising for the IRA in scary pubs.⁵

In other words, what Goodwin seems not to consider is that at some point over the last few generations, my family assimilated into mainstream British culture, to the point where I don’t even know how far back you have to go on my family tree to find people who actually lived on the island of Ireland.⁶

So this is all to say that contrary to Goodwin’s argument, I just simply do not believe that demographics are destiny as he appears to believe, because we can look at history and see plenty of evidence that it isn’t.

For example, in the not-too-distant past, a Protestant marrying a Catholic would have been hugely controversial and there was genuine bigotry against this. But today the overwhelming majority of people would react with little more than a shrug – even though “Papist” is an extremely fun word to say.

Then more recently, we can see the shifting cultural sands at work in other ethnic and religious groups too – with the actual Conservative Party being an extremely good example of this. As Rishi Sunak correctly noted in his 2023 conference speech, he’s the first British Asian Prime Minister… and it wasn’t a big deal, because his ethnicity and religion simply did not matter.⁷

And there are also examples from abroad where demographic arguments go wrong. For example, for a decade or so, the Democrats in America would regularly point to how an increasingly Hispanic America would lead to a “permanent Democratic majority” – only to have this theory blown out of the water as it turns out that Hispanic voters quite like Donald Trump’s ideas too.

So this is all to say that even if the hue of the average Briton’s skin is different in future decades – it doesn’t follow that their values or beliefs will differ too.

Civic nationalism has some good ideas

I think what I find most bizarre about the skeezy end of the right obsessing over what they euphemistically call “demographic change” is that there’s a much stronger set of adjacent ideas out there that make a similar, but much more persuasive right-coded argument, and carry a much less ugly policy prescription. It’s what we call “civic nationalism”.

This is a nationalism that defines your acceptance in society not by the colour of your skin, your religion or where you were born, but instead bases it on your adherence to a set of shared values and institutions.

And if your worry really is about “ties to our nation – to its sense of history, culture, ways of life and collective memory” – and you’re not just using those words as cover for something much uglier – then a civic nationalist approach is obviously a much better way of strengthening those ties.

I mean, though I’m a temperamentally centre-left, throw-open-the-borders guy in terms of my values, even I’ll concede that I do think it can be problematic when specific communities, whether composed of British-born or foreign-born people, are closed off from the rest of society.

For example, it made me sad a few years ago when I read the story of Izzy Posen, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish community in London. There, he was so disconnected from the rest of us that he apparently didn’t know what the 2012 Olympics were.⁸

Similarly, I really do think segregated faith schools are a terrible idea. It seems crazy to me that, especially in places like Northern Ireland, that there are separate Catholic and Protestant schools. Surely that’s exactly the time of life we should want kids to be building friendships across communities, so that sectarian divides aren’t perpetuated for another generation?

And finally, of course, to directly address what you suspect might be the real interest of Goodwin’s study – as a liberal I admit that I do feel a little uncomfortable seeing the extent to which some women may be constrained by cultural norms to wear a niqab.⁹

So this is all to say that I think you can make a credible argument that we need more civic nationalism, and that it’s reasonable to believe the state should do more to wrap everyone into a common national story, premised on our shared respect for traditional British values like democracy, individual liberty, tolerance, and disappointment at every World Cup.

But ultimately, if we do actually want to tie people to Britain, and our history, culture, ways of life and collective memory, the way to do it is not by relying on these values being carried by our genetics or by the circumstances of our birth – but by inviting more people to share this story, and to see themselves in it too.

1. In fact, I only visited the Republic of Ireland for the first time last year.

2. Though I do like the Boston-based Irish folk-punk band the Dropkick Murphys.

3. I think my Canadian partner feels the same about her nationality. Though her parents were literally Dutch immigrants to Canada, and she holds a Dutch passport, her only real link to the Netherlands today is cultural, such as occasionally enjoying unpronounceable Dutch food like Ontbijtkoek.

4. Though obviously because I’m now a metropolitan elite media type, on the census form when it asked about “national identity”, I wrote in “European” because I’m still bitter about Brexit.

5. I’ll let you decide which of these three things I think is worst of all.

6. Another example of this is when I went to Dublin last year: we went to the Post Office Museum. Not for reasons you might expect, but because it was the site of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. And let me tell you this – I definitely felt like one of the baddies while walking around that exhibition.

7. I still remember the extremely bad Trevor Noah clip that did the rounds at the time, pushing back at the racist backlash which… simply didn’t happen.

8. This doesn’t undermine my argument, but I was amused to see Posen’s Twitter feed when writing this, and discovering that his political views on immigration today are perhaps closer to Matt Goodwin’s than mine…

9. Though to be clear, I don’t think the state should ban veils like this – but I would like us to have a society where everyone can freely choose what they wear, and how they live, without religious rules or expectations constraining our choices.