Professor Matt Goodwin teaches at the School of Politics and International Relations at Kent University. He’s not your normal academic and has figured in this blog more than once, as a keen Brexiteer and all-round right-wing nut job. Someone recently accused him of allowing himself to be captured by the ideologies of the very people he’s been studying, adopting and espousing the extreme views of the shaven-headed, racist and tattooed thugs that you expect to find in the BNP.
He’s written a book: Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, that he’s been heavily promoting on every right-wing platform you can think of.
The latest comes in The Telegraph (Sunak’s Tories have lost the Red Wall – and are destined for oblivion) where he says Sunak is losing the pro-Brexit former Labour voters. Goodwin criticises the PM for blaming the party’s present terrible position on Johnson and Truss and accuses him of trying to “be all things to all voters while satisfying none of them.”
Goodwin thinks the Tory party must “rebuild itself around an entirely new electoral coalition and political geography” or face defeat.
What he means is doubling and even tripling down on Brexit, slashing rules and taxes to satisfy a dwindling band of leave voters and ignoring what is now a significant majority who are heartily sick of Brexit. I don’t think you need to be a pundit to realise what he’s suggesting would result in an even bigger disaster.
Besides, a government is supposed to govern for all the people not just its own supporters.
I am not even sure what this new ‘political geography’ he talks of is and I don’t believe he is either. Listen to this:
“As anybody who has ever sat in a focus group will tell you, there was simply no way on earth many of the professional middle-class graduates, young Millennials and even younger Zoomers in the big cities, university towns and liberal enclaves were going to vote for the Tories in 2024. Brexit, Boris and Trussonomics pushed them away for a decade.
“No, the only way forward for the party was to lean into the very people who voted against a broken consensus in 2016 and then leant the Tories their votes in 2017 and 2019. These are the workers, non-graduates, pensioners, cultural conservatives – apathetic and disillusioned masses who saw Brexit Britain not simply as an opportunity to rebuild a broken economic, cultural and political consensus.”
The group he’s talking about is (and I don’t mean to be offensive) generally the older and less well-educated, more parochial and inward-looking. The bright young educated cosmopolitan part are to be abandoned because they would never vote Tory.
Of course, the deprived and less fortunate want a better future but that doesn’t mean it must come at the expense of the rest. In any event, it is a recipe for speeding up our decline. What country on earth would do it?
Goodwin asks questions about Brexit:
"If you’re a recent Conservative convert, in other words, if you’re in the Hartlepools or Darlingtons, or the two-dozen more Red Wall seats that could have still turned Tory at the next general election, why would you have voted for the party at these local elections? What have you actually got since Brexit?"
He answers himself in his own distorted way:
"The answer is a country and a political economy that remains utterly dependent on all the things these voters thought they were rejecting in 2016: mass immigration, a London-centric economy, rampant globalisation, the routine prioritisation of the values and the voice of a liberal urban minority, and a Conservative Party that too often appears uninterested in genuinely reinventing itself to meet the moment."
He doesn’t think for a second that Brexit might have been a mistake. He has all the faith that the communists had in their ideology in the 1950s despite a mass of evidence against it.
If Goodwin ever truly thought the current Conservative Party was interested in those struggling at the bottom of the heap and offered a route out of austerity then I really wonder what he’s doing in commenting on politics.
Peter North
Pete North is the son of Richard North who lives in Bradford and campaigned for Brexit and whose blog was the source of much detailed information on the intricacies of Brexit in the early days.
Pete has been offering his thoughts on multicultural Britain and why the Tories lost seats in the local elections:
Inter tribal violence on our streets, machete wielding schizophrenic Somalians, Islamist suicide bombs, honour killings, forced underage marriage, inbreeding, paedophile grooming gangs, organised crime, rampant homophobia and antisemitism, organised crime, race grifters, lower… https://t.co/TGmfyjUUot
— Pete North (@PeteNorth303) May 8, 2023
I really don't know Bradford very well but I can't say I recognise his description. Pete would support Goodwin I'm sure. And as for Brexit which he and his father campaigned tirelessly for? Well, what about this:
The Tories lost seats because they've been in power for 13 years and they've done fuck all with it. Wokery has marched through all our public institutions, our immigration system (if we can call it that) is in tatters, and this government is determined to press ahead with… https://t.co/upkxLqi8uz
— Pete North (@PeteNorth303) May 8, 2023
Funny how those who were the keenest advocates of Brexit now can't see any point in it but cling to the idea that it will somehow come right in the end if we stick to it or keep doubling down for long enough.
Watch out for more stories of 'wreckers' and 'saboteurs' ala the Soviet press in the 1930s, because this is what happens when leaders are in the grip of a totally daft ideology.
Labels
I have twice posted articles on this blog about the Windsor Framework and the need contained in it to label some goods “Not for EU” on the smallest container. It’s unrealistic to think this can be done at the manufacturing stage before the destination is known so it’s always been clear to me this will appear on a lot of goods sold in GB. This I thought would become an issue and so it has.
Some MPs have noticed or had it explained to them. These are people who voted for the Withdrawal Agreement and the Windsor Framework not knowing apparently what they were voting for:
Iain Duncan Smith has demanded the Prime Minister ditch the “ 'ridiculous regulations', which would apply in Britain from Oct 2024, even though mainland Britain is an island with no land border with the EU."
“They should drop it. It will be seen as ludicrous,” says IDS, "This is not why we left the EU. We were meant to be leaving the EU to deregulate, not to over-regulate.”
The former cabinet minister David Jones says, “There is no good reason why food produced and sold in any part of the United Kingdom should be labelled “not for EU”, much less if it is sold in mainland Great Britain.” I am pretty sure both men voted for the Withdrawal Agreement and the Windsor Framework, without understanding what they were doing.
Nigel Dodds, the DUP peer, said it was “nonsense” that the labels would appear in Liverpool, Harrogate and Leeds, as well as Northern Ireland. At least he didn't vote for it, but he's going to get it anyway.
