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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Now, when 52% of voters decided they wanted to leave the European Union, and I publicly expressed my acceptance of that, I didn't campaign for Brexit, but I said, well, if 52% of people want to leave, okay, let's leave the European Union. And I wrote some op-eds saying perhaps how Britain could take advantage of this. Well, everything in my career after that changed.
I mean, I can only describe it as... being something similar to what I experienced when I was at high school, being bullied by kids in a boys' school, notoriously difficult environments. But academics really did launch a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation. I was taken off research council peer bodies. I struggled to publish.
And suddenly my research grant applications were rejected. So this isn't the sort of complaint of an academic that never had these things. I just noticed such a tangible shift. And after a while, you have to look yourself in the mirror and you have to ask yourself, do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this because I was becoming very depressed. I wasn't particularly pleasant to be around.
You know, it wasn't a nice environment. I have a family, friends. People were saying, you know, what's going on? What's the matter? And I just said, you know, this is crazy. I don't want to spend the rest of my life like this. And I looked at what was happening at the University of Austin. I looked at what was happening at the University of Buckingham here in the UK.
I looked at things like, you know, you've got the Peterson Academy. I said, well, here are parallel structures, parallel institutions. Okay, so that's important. We should be supporting that.
But I also started to campaign for something called the Higher Education Free Speech Act here in the UK, which was the first piece of legislation that created a legal duty on universities here in the UK to protect and promote free speech and academic freedom on campus. And thankfully, that was
that was passed, although the current Labour government is now defanging that law, and we can come on and talk about that. But I decided, basically, I wanted to do something about the state of my country and the state of the West. And to be honest, I concluded that I couldn't really do that while remaining a university professor. I do believe in the importance of neutrality, of objectivity.
I don't think university professors should be politically active to the degree that I want to become politically active. And so I made a decision. I said, okay, I'm going to walk away from this after 20 years, and I'm going to actually try and enter the wider public debate and try and give people a voice.
Look, I think they're gone. I really think they're gone. And I've had this debate with many friends and colleagues of mine, much more successful academics than me. I mean, people I really respect, historian Neil Ferguson, among others. And the way they talk about academia in the 80s and 90s, is something I don't personally recognize from my experience.
I think the universities, the legacy universities, Jordan, are gone. Donors constantly say to me, well, I'm going to buy or invest in an Oxford College and I'm going to reform it. Well, you and I both know, you and I both know it's disillusioned
academics, that the moment that collides with the reality of the ecosystem of higher education, the ethics committees, the research councils, the bureaucracy, you and I both know what will happen. Any attempt to reform the legacy universities will get tied up immediately in paperwork and ideological motivations. That's what's going to happen.
Well, absolutely. But there are also ideological scams. And that's when I became very disillusioned. I watched the grievance studies hoax play out whereby, you know, clearly fraudulent papers were submitted to social justice journals and then revealed to have been authored by, you know, Peter Boghossian himself. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
I watched the Michael Lequeur scandal whereby a researcher had claimed that a randomized controlled trial involving gay canvassers talking to voters face to face made them more supportive of same-sex marriage. It turned out he had fabricated his data, but that was accepted without question by the most prestigious journals in academia. I saw the Roland Frye scandal at Harvard.
The nightmare that he had to go through to publish a finding that challenged the orthodoxy on campus. In that case, that African-Americans were not more likely to be killed by police. And I was just watching one scandal after another and just realizing, you know, the whole thing is rotten. You know, the industry, the sector that I'm working in, it needs root and branch reform. So I left.
And I think in many ways for me, the universities, at least in the UK, are really a symbol of a much deeper rot that has set in into our culture and into our civilization. The institutions, the public sector, taxpayer-funded institutions have become politicized. They've become deeply corrupt. They've become utterly disconnected from the vast majority of ordinary people in this country.
And they have been imposing policies top-down, a political agenda on everybody else that is really supported by only about 10% to 15% of radical progressives within Western populations. And that is what I've seen, not just in universities, but within government departments, within Westminster, within the civil service, within the federal state bureaucracy. And I think people are sick of it.
I think they can see this for what it is, which is political indoctrination.
Yeah, go ahead. Well, look, I think it's just important for people who are not in the UK but have been asking us Brits the same question, you know, what the hell is happening to the UK, right? That's a question I get from many Americans, Canadians and others.
And the answer is that we are living through the effects of a political project that was embraced by both the established left and right, by the Uniparty, that was really united by a set of policies that voters are now beginning to reject. Net zero.
mass uncontrolled immigration, much of it from outside of Europe, the imposition of radical woke progressivism within public sector institutions, doubling down on a London-based economy. We don't really produce anything anymore. We're closing factories across northern England. We're closing steel factories in the name of
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