Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin’s horror views – Muslim ‘ban’ to deportation horror

By-election candidate Matthew Goodwin, who is standing in Gorton and Denton, is said ‘further right than Nigel Farage’ and has claimed to ‘understand where Tommy Robinson is coming from’

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Launching his campaign as the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matthew Goodwin gave a passionate account of his links to the city.

“Manchester made me,” he told a hastily-gathered Reform crowd on January 27th, on a podium on the edge of the constituency. “My grandfather worked seven days a week in the steel factory up the road. My grandmother worked for the University of Salford. Both my parents worked for the National Health Service defending the NHS in Manchester.”

Manchester had given him, he said, the “happiest years of my life”. He just wanted to use his national platform at GB News to give the people of Gorton and Denton a voice.

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Everything was going well – albeit that Reform heavyweight Lee Anderson had tweeted a launch picture in the wrong constituency, Angela Rayner’s.

And then at quarter past midnight on January 30, came a tweet that has racked up 340,000 views. @TRobinsonNewEra – aka the Far Right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon – tweeted ‘Vote for Matt’.

For a former academic who once studied the Far Right and spoke out against Islamophobia, this was a watershed moment. But silence ensued.

Hours later, Labour Party chair Anna Turley wrote publicly to the candidate urging him to make clear whether he rejected Robinson’s backing. “Silence on this is not an option,” the Redcar MP wrote. “If you ignore this issue or attempt to change the subject, or try to hide behind unnamed spokespeople, it will be clear that you are not willing to take on the far right or stand up for those who are directly threatened by it.”

Robinson hit back at cabinet minister Turley. “No1 gives a f*ck what you have to say.” But, again, there was silence from Goodwin. A Reform UK spokesman said the party has been “consistently clear” on its view on Robinson and that “he isn’t welcome in the party”.

Like every other candidate, Matt Goodwin cannot control who endorses campaign. But he can take a public view on his backers. In truth, his dance with Tommy Robinson has been going on for years – and it traces an astonishing political journey made by the former academic.

In 2012, when the baby-faced pair debated on BBC discussion show ‘The Big Questions’ in 2012, hosted by Nicky Campbell, Goodwin was introduced as an ‘expert’ in the Far Right, who clashed with Robinson.

But by April last year, he had clearly changed his views. Speaking to Don Keith, host of the American chat show, ‘The Real Beef’, he sounded much warmer towards Yaxley-Lennon.

“I’ve met Tommy Robinson a couple of times,” he told Keith, who is an associate of Robinson’s. “We actually grew up not too far away from one another. He grew up in Luton. I grew up about 20 minutes down the road in a place called St Albans. And we’re similar age, so in some respects we’re quite similar. You know, so I understand where he’s coming from.

“Anyway, my line on Tommy Robinson has always been that had the state and had the establishment listened to what he was saying when he first emerged in 2009, when he set up the English Defence League, when he talked about the rape gangs, when he talked about Islamist extremism, and when he talked about parts of the state being complicit in some of that – and we now see police officers being arrested for some of that – then I think we would have avoided some of the problems that we ran into as a society over the last decade.”

In the same interview, Goodwin declared himself “very supportive of Elon Musk” and of US immigration policies that have seen ICE clearing cities of legitimate United States citizens and detaining them outside the US.

And he even added: “Here’s one thing he needs to do, Don, before we move on. Here’s one thing President Trump needs to do if he’s watching or if people within his team are – because I know how closer together social media has brought us.

“Here’s what he needs to do. He needs to open up a route for asylum for people fleeing the United Kingdom and our increasingly Soviet Union style government.

“That’s what we need, Don, make it happen, I know you’re a guy with influence. We need an asylum, refugee route for people from Great Britain wanting to return to a land of liberty, freedom and individual rights.”

HOPE not Hate’s Joe Mulhall, who knew Matt Goodwin in his earlier incarnation as someone opposed to the Far Right, when they both worked on anti-Far Right project, ‘Extremis’, says Goodwin is now far to the right of the Reform Party, and far to the right of its leader, Nigel Farage.

Mulhall points to public statements by Goodwin that he claims show he has become an extremist himself. A man who argued on X that “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’.” And who has said that “millions of British Muslims – millions of our fellow citizens – hold views that are fundamentally opposed to British values and ways of life”.

Speaking to the Spectator in June last year he said that: “My view is Englishness is an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations.” While in a recent podcast, Goodwin appeared to echo Great Replacement conspiracy theories. “2063 is the year in which white Britons become a minority in the country,” he said. “If a child is born today, by the time they turn 25 they will likely be a minority among their peers.”

During the 2024 riots following the Southport murders, he wrote a post titled: “What did you expect?” lamenting the fact that “we’ve simply let too many people into our country who hate who we are”.

As Director of Research at HOPE not Hate, Mulhall has watch Goodwin’s journey with interest. “I don’t want to sound dramatic,” he says, “but I can’t think of another example of someone as extreme as Goodwin winning an election in the UK. He is far to the right of Farage, and even to the right of Enoch Powell.

“Goodwin has called for a total halt to Muslim immigration, and I think his racial conception of Englishness would make even Nigel Farage uncomfortable.”

Goodwin is the author of seven books on the Far Right, many of them well-reviewed, and one long-listed for the Orwell Prize. Some of his peers believe he was radicalised by his own research – but Mulhall says he believes it was something more complicated.

“I don’t think he was ever as left-wing as some people think,” he says. “When I knew him, he styled himself as a working-class Tory – someone from the soft right.

“I think of him as an opportunist extremist, on a journey of self-interest. He was a successful academic, a professor of politics at the University of Kent at just 33. He always wanted to be famous. But he was also someone who felt snubbed by the big London universities and Oxbridge.”

Goodwin had always felt an outsider, Mulhall contends, until Farage and friends put their arms around him. “When he worked on his book ‘Revolt on the Right’, published in 2014, he started spending a lot of time with Farage,” he says. ” UKIP gave him really good access. He spent a lot of time in nice restaurants and private members’ clubs with Farage. I think he began to feel comfortable there.”

Goodwin was born in December 1981 in St Albans, Herts. His parents split when he was five and he was raised by his mother, a single parent. His father was a senior NHS executive in Manchester, and his mother worked for their local NHS health board. In 2016, he married Fiona McAdoo, but they divorced earlier this year. They have a daughter.

The anti-woke crusader’s website claims, “he has worked tirelessly to represent left behind groups in British society, speaking up for working-class children and families.” It lists a string of academic appointments including Honorary Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham. He was formerly a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, at Chatham House.

Goodwin’s rise to more mainstream fame began in December 2024 when his right-wing rabble-rousing earned him his own show on GB News, State of the Nation – which he presents with the former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

In 2024, right-wing activist Tim Montgomerie, tweeted that “there really is something sulphurous about Matt Goodwin. Incendiary views. Suspect opinion polls. Massive self-obsession. British public life would be so much better without him.”

Now both men are key figures in Reform, and Montgomerie has retracted his comments. But Goodwin has yet to retract his own about Robert Jenrick, the Tory defector who is the latest dishonourable defection from the Tory party.

“The thing with Jenrick though, is like somebody once said, you can take an injection for weight loss, but you can’t take an injection for personality,” Goodwin said of the former Immigration minister. “There are two things with Jenrick. One is there is no charisma. The second is he’s not as strong as he thinks he is.

“If you look at all of his social media metrics, they’re not actually that good. For somebody who’s supposed to be an insurgent politician on the right, he’s not connecting. He’s a Westminster story.”

The question for Matt Goodwin on Thursday [26th February] is whether he himself remains just a Westminster story – or becomes Britain’s most Far Right MP.

A Reform UK spokesman said: “The only endorsement that Matt Goodwin cares about is the endorsement of the people of Gorton and Denton.

“Tommy Robinson is a free man. He can endorse whoever he likes. Nigel Farage and Reform UK have made it clear on multiple occasions: we want nothing to do with him and he’s not welcome to become a member.”