Matthew Goodwin is an academic, but not a typical one. He is a Professor of Politics from the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He carries out polling and often writes provocative right-wing articles. Goodwin claims not to have campaigned for Brexit but I’m pretty sure he supported and voted for it. If not, his has been one of the greatest conversions ever. You may be aware that he wrote a piece recently which turned up in The Sun. I think it started as a post on his Sub Stack blog, but has been republished now on several outlets.
It was certainly provocative and probably intentionally so to help promote his new book: Values, Voice, And Virtue: The New British Politics (Penguin).
In it, Goodwin charts the rise of national populism, the vote for Brexit, Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory, the fall of Labour's Red Wall, the emergence of a very different brand of conservatism and the mayhem around 'The Year of Three Prime Ministers.' He argues it's the result of some profound shift and he says a 'New Elite' has taken over from the old one and whereas the old elite dominated economic power, the new elite now wields "immense economic power [and] political, social, and cultural power" as well.
Essentially, Goodwin is a professional divider. This new 'woke' elite group which he broadly defines as ‘left-leaning academics’ - has somehow secretly captured the levers of power in this country and is thwarting not only the will of the elected government but also the 'Will of The People'. Brexit has revealed this coup apparently, something Goodwin seems to think is self-evident.
I confess I’m always suspicious when people try to bracket ordinary mortals as if we’re part of some great experiment. I never use the word ‘woke’ for example and try to avoid this wholesale classification of the population as being made up of well-defined sections.
This may partly be due to my own working-class background from a council estate. I slept in a single bed with my older sister until I was eight and although we didn't go hungry (well not very often) we didn't have a lavish lifestyle. Before school, I delivered newspapers on our estate and would read the very different takes on stories of the day on the front pages of The Daily Herald, Sketch and Mirror (left) and the rest, The Express, Mail and Telegraph (right). Even council estate minds are influenced in quite different ways by what they read.
As a teenager and an apprentice, I met other a lot of other working-class youths who all had totally different outlooks. Some were so left-wing they were basically Marxists (one would quote Marx!) while others were far-right racists. A few were openly insane and talked about machine-gunning black people up against a wall. They would easily have joined Moseley's black shirts in the 1930s.
Their only consistent belief was in simple (and often violent) solutions.
Goodwin’s argument espoused in The Sun article has now been challenged by another academic, Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford. Ansell also rejects the idea that sections of the population can be neatly pigeonholed into groups whose attitudes are coherent, consistent and can be described in simplistic terms.
Here is the start of a longish Twitter thread:
POPULISM AGAINST LIBERALISM.I swore I wouldn't. But then I figured, who wouldn't want a deep data dive into whether there's truly a 'new woke elite' with sharply different views to the British people? So I did at the 'forbidden place'. A thread. 1/nhttps://t.co/rjvmmQHjUL— Ben Ansell (@benwansell) April 8, 2023
Ansell shows from his own research that there is zero correlation between your level of education and whether or not you are socially (ie left) liberal or economically (ie right) liberal.
He says the British public is not some monolith. There is no 'Will of the British People' that elites are undermining. We all have different perspectives and that's why we need democracy to iron out our disagreements.
Surveys he has done show an "enormous amount of variation. I colour people grey for degree-holders and black for non-degree. Grey and black dots are everywhere. And the average's right in the middle. Education is not destiny."
So, even if there is such thing as an elite, new or old, there is no 'will' that they are deliberately opposing. And frankly, I don't believe that these left-leaning academics (of which there are a lot) represent any sort of group that is somehow coordinating and working behind the scenes to disrupt government policy. It's just nonsense.
A better explanation for Goodwin's apparent diversion into fantasy comes in a piece by Oliver Eagleton in The New Statesman about Goodwin ‘going native’ and adopting the very ideology that he has been studying for years. I suppose if you spend a lot of time with shaven-headed morons with swastika tattoos, some of it rubs off on you, especially if you are that way inclined yourself.
Eagleton points out that in 2013 Goodwin used to reject the idea "voters were gravitating towards UkIP because their anxieties about migration had been ignored by the major parties."
Goodwin, a decade ago concluded that “the more we stoke public anger and distrust on immigration, the more we threaten the stability of our political system”.
He has now performed a volte-face and shovelling more coal on the fire as he "urges the government to intensify its anti-migrant campaign, lamenting its failure to break with the 'model of mass migration' and dismissing its recent reforms as 'too little too late'. The best electoral bet for the Conservative Party, he says, is to mimic the US Republicans: 'raising the salience of the small boats crisis', taking a 'tough line on illegal migration and national security' and 'consciously leaning into the cultural axis'."
Material grievances, Eagleton says, like "falling wages, gutted public services, decimated trade unions – have little to do with the ascent of Farage and Johnson. Rather, prejudice is thought to be embedded deep in the psyches of ordinary voters outside major cities. The chauvinist impulses of this proletarian layer are incurable. The only difference is that Goodwin defends them while liberal cosmopolitans condemn them."
I suspect beneath it all, Goodwin is doing the same as John Longworth, Julian Jessop, Andrew Lillico, John Redwood and plenty of others. That is to try and persuade an increasingly sceptical public that Brexit isn't failing (it is) and that they need to keep the faith because one day in the distant future it will succeed in addressing all those material grievances (it won't).
