People who study cults sometimes end up joining them. Has this fate befallen Matthew Goodwin, one of Britain’s most visible scholars of the hard right? Since the release of his debut monograph on Ukip, Revolt on the Right (2014), Goodwin has scaled the heights of academic stardom: a professorship at Kent, a fellowship at Chatham House, advisory roles with the UK government, regular media appearances and lucrative after-dinner speeches. Shot to prominence by the boom in “populism studies”, he has joined the crop of political scientists who counsel mainstream policymakers on defusing challenges from the margins. Yet, while mapping the contours of Farageism over the past decade, he has steadily mutated into an advocate for its most crankish tendencies.
Writing in the New Statesman in 2013, Goodwin rejected the argument that voters were gravitating towards Ukip because their anxieties about migration had been ignored by the major parties. On the contrary, he observed, “Britain has tirelessly debated immigration and its effects”, adopting countless measures to tighten the border regime and deter new arrivals, none of which had succeeded in puncturing the appeal of hard-line xenophobic politics. Tossing red meat to the hounds had only made them hungrier – prompting Goodwin to conclude that “the more we stoke public anger and distrust on immigration, the more we threaten the stability of our political system”. The answer was to “chart another course”.
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