Lee Anderson unveiled Matt Goodwin as Reform UK’s candidate (Image: Getty)
Matthew Goodwin is a leading political thinker on the Right who has decided to step away from the commentary box and get on the pitch. As an academic, he won attention for his sharp diagnoses of why so many people were abandoning the traditional parties of power. He was among the highest profile thinkers who detected a populist resurgence with the potential to transform the politics of Britain and beyond.
He was no policy wonk in an ivory tower. He possessed an ability rare among academics to communicate with people who would never pick up an academic journal. A split was coming
He wrote that “merely accepting” the result of the Brexit referendum was “enough to make me an outcast” and he “faced a constant wave of criticism that at times bordered on harassment”.
There were ready opportunities to commentate in the media. And in 2024 he quit his professorship at the University of Kent.
Mr Goodwin took voluntary redundancy but he delivered a blazing parting shot at academia, writing in the Times that universities are “imposing a dogmatic worldview on their academics and students, enforcing a narrow groupthink, silencing dissenters, and eroding the very things higher education is supposed to promote: truth, reason, evidence and wide-ranging debate”.
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He launched his own online newsletter, which he says has more than 90,000 regular readers. On its website he, declares: “Ever since the 1980s, both Left and Right have been waging a revolution, ushering in a radical economic liberalism and a radical cultural liberalism which reflect the values of a ‘new elite’ but have left millions of ordinary people feeling lost and demoralised.”
He accuses a “radically ‘woke’ progressive class of activists” of “reshaping our institutions, our identity, our culture, and our history around a deeply divisive and toxic brand of identity politics”.
Instead, he wants to see “free, dynamic, prosperous, family-oriented societies where ordinary people, not distant elites, are put first” – and now he wants to make this a reality as a Reform UK MP.
Mr Goodwin has regularly stirred controversy with his hard-edged commentary and reached a nationwide audience on GB News. His new challenge is winning over the constituents in Gorton and Denton, until recently represented by Labour’s Andrew Gwynne.
He was the first in his family to go to university, studying at Manchester’s University of Salford. And now he wants to plant a flag for Reform in Andy Burnham’s backyard.
Matt Goodwin has travelled far from traditional academia (Image: -)
He has wider family roots in the city.
As Reform states: “His grandfather worked full time in a Manchester steel factory. His grandmother worked for the University of Salford, which Matt later attended. Both his parents worked for the NHS in Manchester – his father ran the Greater Manchester Health Authority and his mother went to college in the city before working for the health board.”
Not only has Reform gained a tenacious campaigner, it has a sharp thinker who – if elected – will not waste opportunities to launch fire at Labour and the Conservatives in the Commons chamber.
His books include Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics and National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. He has now joined that revolt.