Matthew Goodwin
speaker
155 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Matthew Goodwin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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A lot of people who like to start wars are suddenly very angry with one guy who wants to stop this war. And there are people who have taken us into one disaster after another, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, who have spent much of today on social media attacking Trump. What we're seeing, I think, is a reset of geopolitics, a reset.
We're seeing the breakdown of what you might call the international liberal world order, which saw 20, 30 years of one foreign policy disaster after another. And Trump, you know, I was at the inauguration in America and people around the president are basically saying they've had enough of that. constant interventionism.
They've had enough of Europe, by the way, again, maybe a controversial point, but Europe not paying its way on defence. And they've looked to Germany, they've looked to France, they've looked to Italy, they've looked to the UK, and they've said, you know, what are you guys doing? You know, take Germany as an example.
Germany under the Greens, absolutely bonkers, becoming more dependent upon Russia because of its ridiculous energy policy, becoming more dependent upon China and then turning around and criticizing Donald Trump when he says we've got to end this war. I mean, I'm sorry, it doesn't make sense anymore.
What we've been living through is an elite class imposing policies on everybody else, the consequences of which they are not going to have to endure.
Mass uncontrolled immigration has fundamentally weakened Great Britain. Boris Johnson did the opposite of what he promised voters he would do.
Everyone around the world has heard of George Floyd. Nobody's heard those names. These are girls who were murdered when they were 12, 13, 14 years of age. Not a single police officer, social worker, council official, member of parliament has had any serious consequences for turning a blind eye to this.
Yeah, sure. Well, I'm a recovering academic. I was a professor of political science since 2015. I was a university academic for 20 years. And over the last year, I've basically moved more into the public debate into political campaigning, having left the universities. But in terms of my background, I've also worked, I've been seconded to government departments.
I've advised various prime ministers and presidents here in Europe about political issues. But now, to be frank, I've become so concerned about the state of my country that I've entered the public debate in a much more political way.
I was at the University of Kent, having previously gone through the universities of Bath, Nottingham and Manchester here in the UK.
I think essentially what I saw over the last 20 years was higher education in this country, much like in North America, completely lose its way. It increasingly lost touch with the original mission of higher education. The universities I was working at were no longer really interested in the pursuit of truth.
in good faith debate, in scientific knowledge and evidence, especially in the social sciences. I know that you've spoken on this show to my good friend, Eric Kaufman, who has experienced the same here in the UK. And to be frank, Jordan, I just got sick of it. And I decided, you know, life is short. I wanted to try and do something about what's happening in not just the UK, but in the West today.
And my university ran into financial problems. And I decided this was a great moment to exit and try and have an impact on the wider conversation. And that's what I'm doing, and that's why I'm with you here today.
Well, I think in many ways, Jordan, our stories are somewhat similar within higher education. If you look at the UK, the stat that I always remind people is back in the 1960s, for every one conservative academic, there were three academics on the left. Today, for every one conservative, classical, liberal academic, there are 10 academics on the left today.
If you look at the rigorous surveys of how faculty has changed over the last half century or so. And so within that, what you've seen
You know, as I'm sure many people in North America will also relate to, you've seen the rapid expansion of the university bureaucracy, the politicization of the university bureaucracy, which for an academic like me found its expression in having to do things like mandatory diversity statements.
whereby every time I went for a research grant, every time I went for a job, I had to swear allegiance, essentially, to the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. I had to decolonize my university reading list. But more than that, Jordan, to be frank,
I was sick and tired of watching many of my colleagues, good people, Kathleen Stock, Noah Karl, Eric Kaufman, among others, being harassed, bullied, intimidated, and chased off campus because they were saying entirely legitimate, reasonable things that happened to violate this orthodoxy on campus. And I felt sorry for my students. I felt sorry for their parents who were paying for this education.
And it was particularly for me, actually. It was the experience of going through the Brexit referendum, okay? I mean, just to paint a brief picture, prior to 2016, with the votes for Brexit and Trump, I was, by all metrics, a very successful academic. I was one of the youngest professors ever. in the UK. I had no problem getting research grants.
I attracted a lot of money from the research councils. I published it for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press. I published in the most prestigious academic journals. And this was part of what I would call the BB era in my career, before Brexit.
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