Goodwin’s much derided book shows what peril the Conservatives are still in from Reform UK

Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity by Matt Goodwin

No recent book has received so hostile a reception.

Under the headline “Suicide of an Author’s Credibility”, Ben Sixsmith of The Critic describes Suicide of a Nation as “a very bad book” in which Matt Goodwin doles out “slop” to members of the silent majority who are treated as if they had “the reading level of a dim-witted 12-year-old”.

On X, Andy Twelves points out that many of the quotations in Goodwin’s book appear to be made up, offers a wealth of evidence to that effect, and notes the appearance of ChatGPT in the scanty footnotes.

John Merrick, writing for The New Statesman, calls the book  “a shockingly poor piece of research and writing”, while Mary Harrington on Unherd terms Goodwin a “slopagandist” and observes that “Suicide of a Nation isn’t a book in the conventional sense, so much as a tranche of internet”.

More excitingly for readers of this site, Tim Montgomerie – the founder in 2005 of ConHome, and its editor until 2013, but since December 2024 a prominent member of Reform UK – took to X to say:

“The whole controversy over @GoodwinMJ ‘s book reminds me of the early warning sign that Rachel Reeves’ dodgy footnotes provided about her. @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.”

There rose for a moment in my mind’s eye a delightful vision of the lavish “Welcome Home to ConHome” party which will be thrown for Tim in the Royal Albert Hall, once he decides he can no longer in all conscience remain in harness with a man who writes dodgy footnotes.

What of the actual book? That I had intended to ignore, having already reviewed one of Goodwin’s earlier efforts on ConHome, and found it to be no good.

That policy now seemed unfair. One really ought to see whether the new book is as bad as it has been painted.

Here is how Goodwin begins:

“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. Britain, I believe, is living through such a moment. For decades, the institutions that once embodied our nation − Parliament, the civil service, the courts, the police, the BBC, the universities, the schools, the museums − have drifted away from the public they exist to serve. They no longer protect our interests; they merely perform a morality play for one another.

“Our country is now in the grip of a new ruling class whose members see themselves not as custodians of a living nation, but as supervisors of a global humanitarian project that has no borders, no limits and no loyalty to the people whose taxes fund their salaries. Their defining ideology, as I will show you, is ‘suicidal empathy’ – a deeply twisted worldview that is destroying our country in the name of showing empathy to others.”

One of the limitations of Goodwin as a writer is that he appears to have no sense of history, so implies that our present predicament is worse than any our forbears faced. Yet in July 1975, after the British had voted to stay in what was then the Common Market, Enoch Powell said:

“It is the nation that is dying…or rather, perhaps, it is committing suicide…to be a nation self-governed and self-taxed, living under its own laws and accepting no external authority, meant nothing to the majority.”

And while checking a reference for this piece, I came across a volume of essays published in 1963 called Suicide of a Nation? An Inquiry into the State of Britain Today, edited by Arthur Koestler, who said the British are lions when roused and ostriches who keep their heads in the sand for the rest of the time.

In the 1930s Pont published a drawing of an angry man in an armchair hurling the newspaper across the room, captioned “The British Character – A tendency to think things not so good as they used to be.”

The hymn “Abide with me”, containing the line “Change and decay in all around I see”, was written in 1847. One might multiply examples back to the dawn of recorded time.

The hymn-writer, a clergyman called Henry Francis Lyte, was sustained by his Christian faith. Goodwin finds no consolation in Christianity, and is instead appalled by the rise in the Muslim population:

“By the end of this century, by the year 2100, the share of the country’s population that is White British will collapse from 73 per cent today, to just 33.7 per cent. The share of people who are foreign-born or the immediate descendants of foreign-born parents will rocket from 19 per cent to over 60 per cent. Muslims will go from representing about one in every seventeen people in Britain to one in every four, or one in every three among the young.”

A few years ago, Ed Husain wrote a book about a journey through Muslim Britain, reviewed on ConHome, and warned that many British Muslims lead increasingly separate lives.

Goodwin tells the story from the opposite point of view. He prefers statistics to conversations with human beings, and is a less perceptive writer than Husain, but one ought not to use these limitations as an excuse to ignore the phenomenon he describes.

In May 2014 I went for ConHome to a pub on the eastern edge of London, between Romford and the M25, and asked the drinkers there, all of whom were white and many of whom worked in trades such as roofer, why UKIP, Nigel Farage’s then party, was doing so well.

They expressed a sense of patriotic dispossession: an anger they had lost parts of London which they used to dominate.

They also communicated a certain vulnerability: an awareness that they had better watch what they said, for their indignation was no longer tolerated by the powers that be. One of them said with admiration of Farage, “He’s got the bollocks to say what he likes.”

A month ago Goodwin stood as the candidate for Farage’s current party, Reform UK, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, and came second with 10,578 votes, 28.7 per cent of the vote, to Hannah Spencer for the Greens, who got 14,980 votes, or 40.6 per cent.

Labour was third, with 9,364 votes, or 25.4 per cent, in a seat they had held at the general election with 50.8 per cent, while the Tories fell back from a low base, 7.9 per cent in the general election, to only 1.9 per cent, 706 votes.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that free institutions are no less necessary to the principal citizens, to teach them their perils, than to the least, to secure their rights.

How easy it is to scoff at Goodwin, but in both the by-election and his book he has shown what danger the Conservatives are still in from the almost a third of voters who prefer Reform UK.