Will Matt Goodwin be the UK’s second Reform PM?

The times, they are a-changing. Or are they?

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
Enoch Powell, 1977

Goodwin details how the ‘cosmopolitan’ PMC seized control of Britain’s universities, media, arts industry, political parties, large companies, civil service, charities, not-for-profits and even its military. Inevitably, this eventually engendered a backlash, mainly from non-graduate, working-class ‘traditionalists’ with profound reservations about the dominant (socially and economically liberal) ideology.
Me, 14/4/23

The people who haven’t been to university to learn that they are fundamentally in the wrong start to wonder why they have to work out how to manage this multicultural project. Because new migrants, for the most part, settle in low-income areas while they establish themselves in their new land, not in the upmarket haunts of the hyper-educated sophisticates who argued for them… One Nation’s vote will keep growing – as affronting, symbolic and ineffectual as a raised middle finger. Which is what Australians are giving the whole accursed lot in Parliament House.
Parnell Palme McGuinness, SMH, 1/2/26

One Nation has become a lightning rod for grievance. It is by far and away the party most trusted to handle immigration and, according to the latest poll, is also ahead of the Liberal Party on housing, cost of living and climate change. All without releasing a single detailed policy… One Nation and its views are now part of the mainstream.
Phillip Coorey, AFR, 1/2/26

You know when you’ve been blogging on Substack for a while when formerly obscure individuals you wrote about back in the day start achieving wider public prominence.

When I first began ranting on this platform four years ago, Matt Goodwin was a dissident academic who occasionally appeared on heterodox-leaning podcasts. He was, I’m guessing, largely unknown outside of British political nerd circles.

Since then, he’s quit academia, started appearing more frequently in both independent and legacy media outlets, launched a hugely popular Substack, got a gig on GB News, and generally become both a prominent explainer of, and advocate for, the populist vibe shift.

Now he’s standing for Nigel Farage’s Reform party at the Gorton & Denton byelection on February 26. His core campaigning message is, “This [by-] election is a referendum on Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. If you want him out, vote Reform.”

That might be talking things up a bit, if Goodwin is implying his election would quickly result in Starmer’s defenestration.

But then again, maybe not.

If the Labour vote does collapse and Goodwin romps home, Starmer’s increasingly despairing colleagues could take a leaf out of the Tories’ book and knife him.

If that does happen, Goodwin, who is in his mid-forties, will be even better positioned to throw his hat in the ring for the Reform Party leadership once Farage (61) exits the stage.

And I get the distinct impression Goodwin fancies himself as a future PM.

Then again, what aspiring or actual member of parliament doesn’t?

A new Enoch?
Almost six decades ago, another professor who also wasn’t a fan of immigration or multiculturalism gave a famous speech. That academic was a classics scholar and quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid when criticising the rate of immigration into Great Britain.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” Enoch Powell notoriously sighed.

Powell referred to his oration as “the Birmingham Speech”, but it came to be known as the Rivers of Blood speech.

Powell wasn’t quite cancelled after airing his views, but he was sacked from the shadow cabinet and dashed any chance he had of occupying 10 Downing Street.

In a foreshadowing of what was to occur in the 21^st century, the reaction to Powell’s speech followed a Pareto distribution. The top 20 per cent or so of British society was appalled, while polls found 70-80 per cent of voters supported Powell. (For years afterwards, it wasn’t uncommon to see ‘Enoch was right’ graffitied on buildings.)

Back in the 1960s, most of the migrants arriving in the UK were from Commonwealth nations – Australia in the case of figures such as Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Clive James, John Pilger and, ahem, Rolf Harris – and 95 per cent of Brits were natives.

In fact, the UK was then nearly as ethnically homogenous as Japan still is.

A turning tide
The UK is no longer ethnically homogenous. Like many Anglosphere and Western European nations, it has welcomed many millions of immigrants, frequently from culturally different societies, in recent decades.

If AI doesn’t turn us all into paperclips in the next few years, I suspect future historians, political scientists and sociologists will spend a lot of time examining why the leadership class of many Western societies was so insistent on pursuing policies that were so vehemently opposed by so many voters and that would so clearly lead to an equal and opposite reaction.

In any event, mass-migration enthusiasts spent decades fucking around and are now finding out.

In an example of history rhyming, even ‘new world’ nations are now slamming borders shut, just as they did a century ago. There’s even growing talk of remigration.

What happens now?
I realised the vibe was really shifting away from identity-politics-championing, diversity-worshipping progressivism when Australia’s long-lived, if often chaotic, populist-right party started outpolling its once vastly more dominant centre-right competitor in recent weeks.

Granted, this is now not uncommon across the Anglosphere and Western Europe. But it was still a shock to see support for One Nation surging in a famously laidback nation that’s still in reasonable economic shape.

At this point, the simple narrative is that the pendulum is swinging hard away from Professional-Managerial Class progressivism to blue-collar conservatism. Not a few conservatives and disaffected left-liberals have been whooping it up at this turn of events.

Not least on Substack. As Yuri Bezmenov crowed earlier this week:

Millennial baizuos… went deep into debt for useless degrees that made them feel intellectually and morally superior, but instead made them financially and spiritually bankrupt.

2008 was their crowning moment. They worshipped Obama and thought their liberalism would be cool forever. The New York Times, The Daily Show, BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, and Reddit reinforced their smug echo chambers. They viewed anyone who did not support open borders, trans kids, climate hysteria, DEI, and full-term abortion as deplorable racist fascist bigots.

I can empathise with those who’ve spent years or decades being traduced as deplorable, racist, fascist bigots for questioning eminently questionable progressive orthodoxies.

But the anti-wokesters should be cautious about assuming they are now on the right side of history. Or entirely believing all the encouraging news being gleefully shared in their own echo chambers.

One of Powell’s colleagues, Harold Macmillan, was once asked what worried him and famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.”

There’s no shortage of events – China invading Taiwan, technologically driven labour market disruption, or just possibly, the uniparty deciding to compromise with voters and lower migration intakes – that could cause the political winds to change direction once more.

The grand plans of the populists to reverse four decades of economic and social hyperliberalism may well end in failure.

That is, after all, the nature of politics and human affairs.