The former academic’s candidacy in the Gorton and Denton byelection shows the hard right has evolved. To stop it the left must change too
Matt Goodwin has been selected as the Reform UK candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton byelection – a contest he has a very good chance of winning. I suppose I miss the days when watching the toxic right was more of a cod-psychoanalytical pastime: when you could watch the Goodwin of 2024, preaching the superiority of Hungary in openly anti-migrant terms, compare him to the Goodwin of the mid-2010s, when he was an adviser to the coalition government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred, and say, “wow, this guy’s been on a journey”. What were the waypoints of his slide from “just asking the questions”, through dog-whistle racism, to brazen ethno-nationalism? What could have been the trigger events? Which bad crowd has he fallen in with?
The author James Bloodworth, who mapped Goodwin’s journey rigorously last summer, considers him the intellectual mascot of the politics of resentment. He quoted Goodwin thus: “I just spent four days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the west. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.” These talking points are all commonplace on the hard and far right; migration is situated as a wellspring of social ills, from crime and disunity, through drug use and housing crises, and it is stated with so much confidence, so little evidence or logic, that it’s really more of a muster point than an opinion held in good faith.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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