We need to talk about Comrade Matthew Goodwin

Who controls the U.K.'s Establishment right

Thanks to a tweet from @hector_drummond I looked into the very strange history of Matt Goodwin, the “right-wing” firebrand who is actively promoting Reform UK as the party that will fix Britain and radically reduce immigration. In an earlier incarnation as a typical U.K. academic, Goodwin pushed open borders and smeared anyone who opposed this policy, including Reform UK’s earlier iteration UKIP. Back in 2012 Goodwin was working closely with Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate in a double act designed to close down not just the “far right” but also UKIP. Hope Not Hate is a hard Left “charity” which seeks to smear and de-platform political adversaries who express views with which it disagrees, all under the guise of encouraging hope.

Matt Goodwin carried out a large project under the auspices of Deep State operation, Chatham House, which looked at ways to shut down opposition to open borders. The first stage of this project in 2011 was initiated by World Economic Forum, Young Global Leader and Soros’ associate Daniel Sachs. At the time Daniel Sachs was concerned by “hostility towards diversity.” Matt Goodwin’s first piece of work was focused on the European right. Goodwin produced a report called “Right Response: Understanding and Countering Populist Extremism in Europe” which was de facto a manual showing ways in which the “mainstream elites” could shut down Populist Extremist Parties (PEP). Goodwin developed a number of strategies covering: Exclusion, Defusing, Adoption, Principle and Engagement¹.

Remember the people that Goodwin is helping find ways to shut down were citizens whose “hostility [to immigration] stems mainly from their belief that immigrants and minority groups are threatening their national culture, community and way of life.” These are of course exactly the same people that Matt Goodwin 2.0 now claims to passionately champion as part of the Reform UK movement.

This project moved into a second phase in 2012 leading to a round table discussion at Chatham House titled “From Voting to Violence? New Evidence on Far Right Supporters” which focused on the anti-immigration parties in the U.K. covering not only BNP and EDL but also UKIP². The results of Goodwin’s survey work were presented at a meeting attended by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, Labour MP John Cruddas and others. Back then Dr. Mathew Goodwin presented the results of survey analysis which Nick Lowles then said he would use to target the right “I'd just like to say I think this [Goodwin’s work] is really welcome and I think the more we understand about the extreme right, be it the BNP, be it UKIP, be it EDL, the easier it is for groups like ourselves [Hope Not Hate] to campaign against them.” Please note the inclusion of UKIP here.

Goodwin himself was derogatory about people who wanted to limit immigration, describing the European right as people who “tend to be middle aged or elderly working class men who lack qualifications and are pessimistic about their lives.” He helpfully includes this picture in the accompanying presentation slides;

Interestingly, none of these Leftists actually deny that mass immigration would undermine British culture, they are simply seeking approaches which would weaken opponents of open borders policies. In his survey data, Goodwin even identifies that many people both nationally and particularly in UKIP did not want to have mosques built next to them.

Despite the “mainstream elites” knowing this in 2012, there are now well over 1,500 mosques in the United Kingdom. Goodwin was clear that he also viewed UKIP as being problematic, he wrote in the Guardian in 2012 that UKIP (then led by Nigel Farage) “shares more with the far right than it admits.”³

Chatham House the host for this project is itself what I term Deep State in that it receives funding from the “usual suspect” oligarch foundations including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and similar Leftist foundations⁴.

But wasn’t this all dealt with?

Connor Tomlinson from supposedly right wing New Culture Forum/Lotus Eaters “challenged” Matt Goodwin over his previous associations with the Left in this 2024 interview.

You can see that Tomlinson allows Goodwin to claim that he was opposing the extreme right, whereas the Chatham House meeting and Goodwin’s Guardian comments clearly show that he had UKIP in his crosshairs. There is little doubt in my mind that Connor Tomlinson knew that Goodwin was targeting mainstream opposition to mass immigration and simply allowed Goodwin to lie by omission. Tomlinson did not respond to Direct Messages (DM) requests via X.com seeking clarification.

COVID position

Along with the rest of Reform UK’s leadership, Goodwin also actively toed the Establishment line over COVID. Farage infamously endorsed Tony Blair to run the vaccination programme in January 2021⁵ and Richard Tice and Dr. David Bull both endorsed compulsory vaccination for care home workers. Goodwin praised vaccine manufacturers as “heroes” who produced a vaccine within a year despite knowing that vaccine development programmes take more than a decade.

Media platforms

In a way the entire Reform UK leadership can be considered to be oligarch creations given their significant media exposure, with Tice and Bull receiving significant exposure via Murdoch’s Talk TV channel. Farage and now Goodwin also receive significant exposure via shows on Legatum/Sir Paul Marshall funded GB News. Brand awareness is somewhat depressingly a key requirement for political “success” so it is fair to assume that Reform UK leadership owes much of its political traction to these oligarch owned media channels.

The road to Damascus

The question that remains is; has Matt Goodwin had a Damascus-like experience and flipped from an open borders Left wing academic funded by “mainstream elites” to a hard-right advocate of mass deportations?

My own view is that Matt Goodwin remains an open borders Leftist and promotes Reform UK in the knowledge that it will be used to deliver the Deep State agenda and betray the hopes of its supporters. Back in 2024, I set out my reasoning as to why I believed that Reform UK was a charade, primarily because it abandoned British values in order to embrace totalitarian COVID tyranny. Nigel Farage recently gave the perfect illustration of this theory when he failed to show up for the vote on de-criminalising abortion to birth on 17^th June 2025 and instead went on his highly paid GB News slot in order to push the Establishment’s next “forever war” in the shape of regime change in Iran. I suspect that Reform leadership will always choose the interests of the oligarchs over the wishes and interests of the party’s rank and file (as will almost all other political leaders).

Currently, Reform UK is throwing out click-bait to keep racial tensions high whilst avoiding even mentioning the existential threat to individual liberty posed by the introduction of BritCard compulsory digital ID. I don’t believe that is an accident and that eventually Reform UK’s flag waving leadership will support compulsory digital ID.

For these and related reasons⁶ I don’t believe that Comrade Matthew Goodwin has had a Damascus like conversion and remains at heart an open borders academic. I will leave you with this screen grab, if you know you know⁷.

Many thanks and let me have your comments below.

Alex

(for real solutions please look at the posts entitled Winning the Ominwar, which focuses on grass-roots organisation and suggests staying as far away as possible from oligarch funded movements.)

1. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/r0911_goodwin.pdf

2. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Meetings/Meeting%20Transcripts/080312goodwin_presentation.pdf

3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/12/ukip-far-right-bnp

4. https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/our-funding/donors-chatham-house

5. https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1346221668688125952

6. One related reason is the number of former Revolutionary Communist Party activists that the Brexit Party fielded as candidates in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, including Lady Claire Fox.

7.