Let’s get this out of the way early: Matt Goodwin’s new vanity press-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 – most 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 world-view 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, is 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 appears 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 so 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 among 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, which has hosted Goodwin’s writing for years, is, 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 by-election 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.
[Further reading: James Goldsmith, godfather of British populism]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentWell, yes, but the fact that Mein Kampf was also badly-written self-pitying trash didn’t stop it influencing a successful right-wing insurgency. It’s all very well to rip the book apart for its tedious clunky style, but in the end that just comes across as the elite sneering that Goodwin has pre-emptively inoculated his readers against. It would be helpful if the reviewer could mention – or link to – more specific pointed rebuttals to the paranoia that we could use to argue against this book. The line about “if British culture is this feeble how come it’s survived so long?” is a start: more like that please!
Tiresome though Goodwin is (I’ve heard him speak in person, and I particularly disliked his cynical attitude to global warming), he has at least one advantage: he can provide an answer to the question “How much TOTAL CUMULATIVE immigration of those from other races and cultures should be the limit?”. We on the Left either evade that question, or give answers which amount to “there should be no limit, in the fullness of time it can be equivalent in number to the entire white British population, or even more than that”. Voters know that, and a revolt by soft-left MPs to water down Shabana Mahmood’s proposals will make it even more obvious that that is the Left’s response.
As a white man who’s spent all his 57 years in this country, I feel no need to ‘evade’ this question because I genuinely don’t care about others’ racial heritage, and so the question doesn’t interest me.
Culture changes constantly, whether we like it or not. Britain was a very different place fifty years ago, and it will be a very different place in fifty years. Many things drive change.
Our fertility rate is just 1.4, and we’re closing schools as we run out of kids. This means we’re going to have to rely on economic immigrants, the correct number of which is whatever it takes to make up for our not having children. I don’t care what impact that has on the country’s racial makeup.