Nigel Farage with Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton, February 2026. Photo: Gary Roberts/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
It probably says something about the state of my social life that I chose to spend an entire Saturday evening reading Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, a new, seemingly self-published book by Dr Matthew Goodwin, recently defeated Reform UK candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection. I was initially planning to write a comparative review, looking at fellow conservative commentator Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam – what can only be described as the significantly better-written 2017 version of the book Goodwin wishes he had the ability to write.
Goodwin’s book sets out to argue that Britain is in the grip of a profound and accelerating crisis – driven by 30 years of mass immigration, a loss of shared identity, and what he frames as a detached, ideologically captured “new ruling class” unwilling or unable to confront either. It attempts to be a final warning: that cultural fragmentation, institutional failure, and political cowardice are combining to push the country towards irreversible decline. The only way to avoid it, obviously, is to listen to him.
If you follow Goodwin online, you’ll know he hasn’t been shy about saying so – in recent days he’s presented this book as a phenomenon – raving about Amazon rankings and promoting the idea that “The Left don’t want you to read it”. You would think from this alone, that it was the greatest piece of writing to come out of the British right since Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy.
Wrong. Apart from the President of Students for Reform UK, of which Goodwin also serves as Honorary President of, not a single rightwing pundit, commentator, or politician has come out for him. He has lost the support of the conservative Critic magazine, Reform UK’s Tim Montgomerie, and rightwing libertarian pundit Reem Ibrahim.
Once you get past the awful writing style and actually engage with the arguments, you’re hit with the shallow idea of a “new ruling class”, which raises a basic question: who, exactly, was the old one. Surely as a career political scientist who has built a profile critiquing Britain’s institutions from both inside and outside them, Goodwin should be able to define it clearly? He gestures at a “new generation of rulers” as if this is self-evident, but never properly defines who these people are, what makes them meaningfully different from the old generation, or when this supposed changing of the guard actually happened.
Instead, we get a breathless list of what he views as this “new” elite: “politicians, civil servants, academics, broadcasters, NGOs, corporate executives, judges, activists, and more”. This is fascinating, because it’s essentially just a list of people who have always, in any functioning society, constituted the ruling class. That’s what those roles are. Even by his own definition, Goodwin – an academic, a broadcaster, a (defeated) Reform UK parliamentary candidate – is very clearly one of them. Is his show on GB News part of this all-powerful new media elite? Are his employers at the University of Buckingham?
Despite this kind of poorly thought-through analysis, I decided to read on, past his misrepresentation of primary school children with “English as an additional language” status as not speaking English at all – giving him the benefit of the doubt. As a career academic and Orwell prize longlister, I assumed he wasn’t making things up, just spinning them to fit his narrative – a sin you can almost forgive in a rightwing polemic.
Paired with the almost hallucinatory quotations that vaguely summarise the views of thinkers, it raises the question: how much of this book is grounded in real sources?
And then came a moment that can only be likened to the scene in Inglourious Basterds when Michael Fassbender raises three fingers and the Nazi across the table realises he is, in fact, an imposter. For me, it came with one of Goodwin’s more confident asides: “In 2019, BBC West Midlands highlighted schools where children speak more than 30 different languages, making normal teaching almost impossible…”. This is the kind of detail designed to be extremely specific and real, supporting Goodwin’s argument about the state of our nation.
Except it isn’t real. I cannot find any evidence that “BBC West Midlands” ever ran such a story. There is an extremely positive 2021 piece in the Metro about a Birmingham primary school likened to a “mini UN” where pupils speak more than 30 languages, hardly the same thing, and certainly not the source he claims. What is more, BBC West Midlands doesn’t really exist in the way he uses it. There’s BBC Midlands online, and regional TV output that sometimes gets badged as BBC One: West Midlands, but on the ground it’s BBC Birmingham, BBC Shropshire, BBC [insert your regional city here].
That is when I stopped taking notes, and began reading the book all over again, to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. Because what I went on to discover was that the things Goodwin got wrong weren’t obscure academic citations or quibbles over statistical interpretations. They were objective falsehoods.
Among these were a false report about Bradford classrooms that appear nowhere on the internet and aren’t credited elsewhere, an Ofsted inspection report quote that doesn’t exist, a string of invented or misattributed quotations from Cicero, Livy, Hayek, Burnham, Noah Webster, Walker Connor, even Sir Roger Scruton, someone Goodwin claims was one of his biggest influences. Add to that basic factual errors, one claim that Boris Johnson’s was in Opposition in 2019, mistakes about visa breakdowns, misunderstandings about how institutions actually function, and what you’re left with is something far more troubling than polemic or spin. This is a body of work that repeatedly attacks the credibility of those in authority, but collapses under even light scrutiny, revealing a patchwork of half-truths, distortions, and, in several cases, claims and quotes that simply don’t appear to exist.
We know for a fact that Goodwin used ChatGPT while researching this book – the tell-tale “?utm_source=chatgpt.com” appears in several of the references. Paired with the almost hallucinatory quotations that vaguely summarise the views of major thinkers, it raises an obvious question: how much of this book is grounded in real sources, and how much has been generated, distorted, or stitched together through AI?
After I confronted Goodwin with all of this on X, he completely dismissed any criticism as the work of “leftwing trolls”, and has since continued to insist that this is a great book and everybody should read it because “it reveals what is happening to Britain”. He also said that he can “see no issue obtaining datasets via AI so long as they are cross-checked with the original source”, but it is a shame that this process was not extended to the various “quotes” from academics he used to justify his arguments.
If this book really does “reveal what is happening to Britain”, then it should be able to withstand a bit of scrutiny from someone like me. Today, Goodwin offered to publicly debate me. Happy to Dr Goodwin – on your GBNews show, on the PoliticsJOE podcast, or on any broadcaster you like. I’ll meet you there, go claim by claim, source by source, quote by quote. Because at the moment, what you’re asking your audience, many of whom are working class people spending their hard-earned money, is to take it all on trust, and they deserve far better than that. Let me know when and where.
Andy Twelves is a political writer and broadcaster, and fellow of CampaignLab and Newspeak House, the London College of Political Technology.