And On It Runs

From the New Statesman, where John Merrick writes:

Let’s get this out of the way early: Matt Goodwin’s new self-published book, Suicide of a Nation, is bad. Very bad. In fact, even for the increasingly gimcrack world of the British right, it is a shockingly poor piece of research and writing, made worse by the fact that Goodwin was until recently a fairly well-respected academic.

As the writer Andy Twelves and others have catalogued, the book is filled with falsely attributed quotes (all of which, oddly enough, have the same flattened style as Goodwin himself), misinterpreted data, and dubious, out of context or just plain made-up statistics. Of the only 12 footnotes in the book – the vast majority of which are in the first chapter, as if he gave up with references after the first few pages – two contain links that still have their ChatGPT source code embedded in them. Of the rest, five are to Goodwin’s own blog, while another is to a Telegraph article about something Goodwin himself wrote.

All of which is to say that you will almost certainly not read this book. But, in an attempt to move beyond its most obviously egregious aspects, which I imagine will continue to be aired on social media, and to discover what little thought animates it, the task comes to me to summarise the worldview of Matthew Goodwin, aspiring tub-thumper.

Britain, Goodwin tells us, is declining fast. Our borders have been eroded and our public services run down, while our living standards deteriorate and the welfare bill skyrockets. In fact, such is the state of the nation that it if it continues on its current path it will soon cease to be. “Within just one generation,” he writes, “Britain will no longer be Britain. England will no longer be England. The country that we still just about know and recognise, the country our ancestors built, will be no more.”

If Britain is dying, then it is not the result of murder. It is death by suicide at the hands of a mendacious class of government and corporate mandarins, people he dubs the “New Elite”, who have taken over the country since the Blairite victory in 1997, the annus horribilis for the new right. Before then, Goodwin says, Britain was dominated by an “Old Elite”, a kindly and patrician group “comprised of aristocrats, politicians, clergy and intellectuals”. They were patriotic, valued duty and felt a deep kinship and obligation to the nation. The New Elite, on the other hand, are driven by something else entirely, an insidious ideology that Goodwin following the right-wing Canadian marketing psychologist Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”: “a one-way, unconditional compassion that always favours outsiders over your own people”.

This new ideology means that our governing class are now more concerned about being “on the right side of history” and protecting the vulnerable and needy (particularly if they are not white and native British) than promoting a strong and virile indigenous national culture. What’s worse is that they openly disdain ordinary people “as not only hopelessly provincial but morally inferior”. Such is the rot at the heart of the establishment that “their loyalties lie not with Britain but with a global class of other elites” – rootless cosmopolitans, you might say.

This New Elite of politicians, bureaucrats, NGO workers and other assorted do-gooders who make up the “global managerial class” have stuck their needle deep into the arm of Britain, infecting it with a “new moral virus”, “a moral and institutional sickness”. Such aggressive, near masochistic rhetoric reappears on almost every page of Suicide of a Nation, a clear symptom of how far along the pipeline of the hard right Goodwin now is. He even drags out the old far-right canard about cultural Marxism to scare his readers, claiming that “the New Elite followed the exact playbook outlined by the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci”.

Yet, despite the suicide of the title, the book isn’t really about the New Elite at all. It is really about immigration, and the dire threat that Muslims pose to the country. Britain, Goodwin says, is now replete with “segregated Muslim areas, blasphemy laws, the rise of Islamic sectarianism in politics, the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs… anti-Semitism”. The people we have been “importing” have come from cultures that are “inferior, primitive”, “stuck in cultural codes, behaviours and lifestyles that Western nations abandoned centuries ago”. He even doubles down on his controversial claim that being British “requires more than a passport”: “they might be administratively British”, he writes, “but they are not one of us in a true sense”.

After only a few pages you’re left with the distinct impression that the talk of “suicidal empathy” was in reality a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing him to rail against “incompatible” foreign cultures and the “demographic replacement” of the “White British” by a “foreign tide” of nefarious “invaders” who “terrorise, murder, rape and assault” – all while offering some plausible deniability for any racist intent. “Immigrants pursuing their own interests are not to blame for any of this,” he writes, after castigating them in the harshest possible terms for several chapters. “The people I blame are those in Westminster who rule over us.” Yeah, right.

If this is a bleak picture, Goodwin predicts that it will only get worse as the demographic collapse continues, with Muslim birth rates outpacing those of white Brits, and immigration rates continuing to accelerate. In the process, British culture itself will soon be erased. Yet, quite what the culture that Goodwin strides forth to defend reads as both almost entirely empty and almost unbelievably, fragile. “As mass immigration continues to import into Britain radically different cultures from outside Europe,” he writes, “the core of the nation is being gradually weakened and will, eventually, give way altogether.” To this end Goodwin marshals Roger Scruton who apparently once called Britain’s national culture our “delicate spirit” (I haven’t checked this one, so who knows). Such a precious spirit is no match for the brutish foreign hordes, with their hostile ways of life. Which rather raises the question, if British culture really is this delicate then how has it managed to survive this long?

Scruton, whatever his politics, was nothing if not a cultured and erudite writer. Not so Goodwin, whose artless prose and deadened style reads more like the transcribed mumblings of the very worst pub boor than a spirited defence of Britishness. Britain, he writes, “gave the world liberty, reason, science, the Industrial Revolution, the English language, Shakespeare”; now, you’re tempted to respond, the best it can generate is vapid and platitudinous screeds with all the poetry of a “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” sign. On every page are passages that clang so hard they set your teeth on edge; sentences like “if shared language is the glue, then a shared national identity is the anchor” and patronising asides asking you to “think about that for a minute”.

And on it runs. There are apparently never-ending lists, all within a couple of paragraphs: “The ruling class and their cheerleaders – Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan, Tony Blair, Emily Maitlis, Alastair Campbell, James O’Brien”; “places like Newham, Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Leicester, Slough, Tower Hamlets or Westminster”; “Enfield, Luton, Barnet, Camden, Boston and Cambridge”; “Peterborough, Watford, Reading, Coventry, Nottingham and Southampton”. There is an assembly of clichés and cheap rhetorical tricks: “the hard-working, law-abiding majority”; “The hour is late, but not too late”; hundreds of sentences saying that it’s not X, it’s Y. And throughout, the same, hollering, maddening, dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum rhythm, with one thing following painfully, agonisingly after another, all without depth or range or style or tone. “Winston Churchill would have laughed. Margaret Thatcher would have kicked the table over.” Well, quite.

If this were AI-generated it would almost be a relief. The sad truth, however, is that even ChatGPT couldn’t come up with anything this dead. This is not the language of AI. It’s another digital phenomenon – the language of Elon Musk’s X. Log on to social media and you’ll find essay-length posts by blue-checked right-wingers all composed in the same style: short, clipped phrases and paragraphs of only one or two sentences, larded with dodgy data and spiced unverifiable conjecture. That same social media also seems to have provided Goodwin with much of the book’s content, which will be familiar to anyone who has had even a cursory scan of right-wing Twitter over the past year or two.

Perhaps even worse, however, is the ever-looming spectre of the “Censorship Industrial Complex” that is nestled in amongst all the flaccid attempts at demagogy. This, Goodwin says, is responsible for silencing all of us in the right-thinking majority. “The ruling class will not dwell on any of this. They will dismiss it as paranoia, exaggeration, or scaremongering.” Even more, “the elites will attack me because I wrote this for you”, he writes: “they will call me every name under the sun because I dare to tell you the truth”. (It must be nice, if not depressing, to have a ready excuse for the bad reviews you know your book will elicit.)

The political right, who have hosted Goodwin’s writing for years, are, we must conclude, a thoroughly post-literate bunch. They may be buying the book, if its rush up the Amazon bestseller charts is any indication. But it’s hard to see them reading, much less enjoying, it. Perhaps we knew this already: after all, it is not from literature or art that the modern British right gets its insight and its influence, but from AI, and the gassy brain-farts of social media. From this, Suicide of a Nation is perfectly cast: all surface and no depth, a grab-bag of decontextualised data and empty provocations.

According to the preface, the book was written in December 2025. Perhaps Goodwin wrote it with the idea that its release would coincide with his accession to the mother of parliaments as a Reform MP. Suicide of a Nation would then be a triumphant volley fired from the Palace of Westminster to the nation at large, announcing Matt Goodwin as major political figure. That’d certainly have shown the New Elite.

It wasn’t to be. On 26 February, Goodwin was decisively defeated in the Gorton and Denton by-election by Hannah Spencer of the Greens. There is a lesson in this, about mistaking short-term popularity for perspicacity, inflated self-regard for mass appeal. And that he still published this book in its aftermath helps demonstrate the utter vapidity of much of the British right. Goodwin, it can no longer be doubted, is a major figure in Reform, one of their house intellectuals and a prominent member of the party’s inner circle, chosen to be their candidate in what they hoped would be a set-piece byelection campaign. That, when he came to set down his ideas, all he could do was to produce trash like this is surely a poor sign indeed.

Since he left academia, Goodwin has made a lucrative career for himself peddling the same sort of sensationalist pap on TV and online, claiming to speak for the forgotten white majority and wilfully misinterpreting Britain’s social forces for his own gain. If the experience of the past month means anything, then it should lead to even a small moment of critical self-reflection. Britain is telling him something. But Goodwin, we can be sure, won’t hear it.

Even unto The Spectator, where Michael Gove solemnly excommunicates Matt Goodwin from the British Right by publishing Andy Twelves himself:

After losing the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election to a leftwing plumber, Reform’s Matthew Goodwin has published a new book: Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity.

It’s clear that Goodwin was trying to emulate Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which was published in 2017. It has almost the same tagline and rough thesis. But while we can be sure that Murray did not use AI to write his book, I cannot extend the same confidence to Goodwin’s attempt, which opens with:

‘There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes – not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.’

Anybody who has used ChatGPT will recognise the telltale signs of possible AI writing, such as the ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ comparisons and the strange obsession with things being quiet or silent.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Goodwin has responded to my criticisms saying that they are ‘spurious and false’. He has also said, elsewhere, that his critics on the left have clearly not read his book, and that he has not used as many references as an academic book would have as he is seeking to reach a mass audience. But we can see, at the very least, that ChatGPT helped with parts of his book, because he left the ChatGPT URL in some of the few references used to justify his arguments. Goodwin says that he only used AI to obtain datasets and cross-checked them.

Much of his analysis appears to refer to events, places and people which do not exist – another indication that a writer has relied on large-language models (LLMs), which frequently ‘hallucinate’ facts.

Take Goodwin’s claims about British schools. He cites reports that in one Bradford classroom, only four out of 28 pupils spoke English as a first language, with teachers reduced to mediating ‘dozens of languages.’ I can find no reporting that backs up this claim and Goodwin provides no source for it in his book. The case sounds suspiciously like the response when you type, ‘find me an alarming case of no English in a primary school’ into ChatGPT and hit enter.

Goodwin also cites a ‘BBC West Midlands’ report from 2019 about a school where 30 languages are spoken by its pupils. I also cannot find any record of this report. What’s strange is that there are plenty of stories, including in Birmingham, which Goodwin could have cited. In 2021, the Metro and Birmingham Mail wrote about Water Mill primary school in Selly Oak, for example, where 31 languages were spoken. But if Goodwin had read these reports he would have found that Water Mill was at the time one of the top two per cent rated schools in the country.

Instead, Goodwin quotes an ‘inspection report’ which says: ‘Many pupils join the school with extremely limited English.’ Again, I cannot find any reference to this quote after reading multiple Ofsted reports about schools where multiple languages are spoken. What the Ofsted reports do say, repeatedly, is that these schools are generally good at their jobs, that their pupils make strong progress, and that support for English as an additional language is effective. But perhaps this doesn’t fit into Goodwin’s narrative.

The sloppiness does not end here. Goodwin seems to have created quotes by Cicero, Hayek, Roger Scruton, Livy, Noah Webster, James Burnham and Walker Connor – an impressive feat, in a sense. ‘The most dangerous experiments are those conducted on entire societies’, is a quote that Goodwin attributes to Hayek, despite there being no record of it elsewhere. It seems the most dangerous experiment is publishing a book without any fact-checking.

Reading the book at some point you have to ask: did Goodwin verify any of his claims? Did he open a single book writing his own? Or did he just accept whatever an AI chatbot spat out because it would make him sound vaguely informed? After I posted about the errors in his book, Goodwin suggested I was a ‘left-wing troll’ and thanked me for boosting sales. He did not address his use of the seemingly fake quotes or produce a source for them. He has, in fairness, invited me to debate him about the veracity of his book on GB News next week, something I am greatly looking forward to.

Goodwin has no real excuse for inaccuracies in his book. In the past he was a well-regarded academic at the University of Kent. If one of his students had handed in a dissertation with hallucinated quotes and references that don’t exist, he would obviously have failed them. Unfortunately, it appears that any academic rigour Goodwin once had has long since dissipated.

Goodwin is perhaps very slightly too young to realise how laughable it is to suggest that Britain was still being run by his Old Elite until as late as 1997, although he ought to know that that absurdity was fundamental to New Labour and thus to his New Elite. It is no less risible to suggest that the Old Elite was as Goodwin described. The recently uncovered image of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson and the then Prince Andrew said everything about both Elites, including that they were both in a state of undress. As, after this, is Reform UK.