Matt Goodwin dissects the UK’s 2024 election collapse, where the Conservatives lost power despite Brexit’s realignment promise—Keir Starmer’s Labour secured a majority with just 39.9% of the vote, the lowest since 1880, while Nigel Farage’s Reform Party won 5 seats and 4M votes (14%) by capitalizing on immigration backlash. Goodwin warns that Britain’s conservative elite, ignoring working-class concerns over rising Muslim populations (20-25% projected by 2050) and woke policies like unproven gender-affirming care, risks irrelevance as radical leftists and Islamist groups dominate public discourse, urging Republicans to learn from Trump’s voter-aligned approach. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, Andrew Clavin here with this week's interview with Matthew Goodwin.
I lived in Britain for most of the 90s, and it's interesting because the politics, of course, is very different.
The system is different.
But it always turns out to be some kind of funhouse mirror of what's going on in America.
And sometimes it leads us and sometimes it follows us, but you can always tell a lot by looking at what's happening in Britain about what is happening here.
You can learn a lot about the U.S. At least that's been my experience.
Matthew Goodwin, who we're going to talk to today, was recently praised by John O'Sullivan Claremont Review as one of the few political scientists who interpret the ongoing realignment of British politics in ways favourable to the right.
And I do as well, but I'm not as knowledgeable as he is.
He is the second, has the second biggest substack in the UK.
He's ranked fourth on the sub-stack world politics list.
He's advised two of the last three British prime ministers and is ranked among the most influential conservative voices in the UK.
So I wanted to talk to him about what's going on over there.
Matthew, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
It's a really great time to have this conversation.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean, I think to begin with, you might want to just explain to an American audience what just happened in the elections.
Well, look, there's a lot to learn for Americans from what just happened in the UK here.
So the Conservative Party basically just completely collapsed at our general election.
It fell to the lowest number of seats in its entire history.
Now, remember, this is one of the most successful political parties in the history of democracy.
Well, the Conservatives just completely collapsed.
The Labour left-wing government, on the other hand, won its largest majority in Westminster since Tony Blair in 1997, perhaps when you were in Britain, Andrew.
But also Donald Trump's friend, Nigel Farage, and his reform party really broke through.
They won only five seats in the House of Commons, but they won 4 million votes and 14% of the national vote.
So they've become a key player in British politics.
So we see some really significant moves here.
And I'm sure we'll get into the detail about why all of that matters for Americans.
But the short story to me is when I look at America from the UK, I see a Republican Party that is fully in tune with the post-2016 political realignment.
I see Trump's numbers looking as strong as ever.
But when I look at the British Tories, when I look at the British Conservative Party, well, here was a party that had that same post-2016 realignment that found its expression through Boris Johnson's big victory in 2019, but which since then, by not really being a Conservative Party, has actually squandered that post-2016 realignment.
And that is basically the story as to what has just unfolded in the UK.
It's a pretty amazing waste of power.
I mean, a pretty amazing waste of this victory.
But just to be clear, the system there does permit a small percentage of popular votes to give you a large majority, right?
Is that fair to say?
Well, absolutely.
The left-wing government that we now have, the Labour Party, actually was elected with the lowest share of the vote for any majority government that we've had since the 1880s.
So there is no mass public enthusiasm for this left-wing Labour government.
The story is basically under our system, the Conservative Party collapsed to such an extent that Labour became the big beneficiary of that.
So, and can you tell us anything about the new prime minister in American papers?
They made him sound a little bit moderate.
He's anything but moderate.
This is a guy who wanted us to elect the radical socialist Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister in 2017 and 2019.
He's somebody who refused to accept the vote for Brexit.
He wanted a second referendum to overturn the public vote for Brexit.
He's very critical of Donald Trump.
Much of his top ministerial team have gone on record saying they think that Trump is a danger to democracy, is a racist, is a neo-Nazi.
This is a government that basically, I mean, in all seriousness, is, I think, going to undermine the special relationship between the UK and the United States.
And more fundamentally, you know, he is pro-immigration.
He is big state.
He is big tax, big regulation, big on net zero, big on climate change policies.
And I think because we now have this government with coming into power with not a very convincing mandate, I think it's going to run into some trouble pretty quickly, to be honest with you.
So let's talk about, before we get to America, I want to actually understand the whole thing here.
Let's talk about this kind of betrayal.
Brexit was a huge victory for the right and it seemed to be, as I understood it, the votes came from a kind of a wide spectrum of people.
I'm not sure what unified them, but it was to get out of the EU, which is an oppressive, unrepresentative form of government.
And it seemed to me from far away that immigration was at the center of this.
But since when the Tories took over, immigration skyrocketed.
So what's going on there?
Was that unwillingness to do what the people wanted or was it incompetence?
What happened exactly?
Well, I think the UK and the US had a similar 2016.
Just take your minds back.
America elected Trump.
We voted for Brexit.
Now, what were those two moments ultimately all about?
I think they were about wanting to live in a self-governing, independent nation state that is fully in control of its own borders, that has some immigration, but manageable immigration, which returns political and cultural power to the masses, to voters, not just an elite minority in the big cities, and which takes our distinctive history, identity, and ways of life very seriously.
And I think those are the similarities between those two movements.
Now, what happened thereafter is that America and Britain went in fundamentally different directions.
In Britain, what happened is Boris Johnson became the beneficiary of that current, that mood.
In 2019, he won an enormous majority on the back of Brexit.
He said, let's get Brexit done.
Let's reduce immigration.
Let's control the borders.
He won the biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
But basically, he lied to the British people.
That's the story here.
What happened after winning power is Boris Johnson liberalized the immigration regime.
He sent legal immigration to record levels, levels that we've not seen before in our history at any time in our history.
He lost control of the borders.
He refused to leave international courts, the European courts that would have allowed us to take back control of our national borders.
And he really treated the people who had voted for him in 2019 with contempt.
I mean, he did not treat them in a serious way.
He didn't treat them with respect and recognition.
So what happened this week in Britain, what we're living through currently, is really the reaction to that.
So a lot of conservative voters are now saying, well, look, we lent you our vote in 2019.
You took that for granted.
And a large number of those voters, about one in four, decamped to Nigel Farage, Donald Trump's friend in the Reform Party.
They said, look, if the Conservatives aren't going to deliver lower immigration, if they're not going to control the borders, then we're going to go over to this new party on the right, the Reform Party.
And a large number of other Conservatives just stayed at home.
They just gave up on politics.
We've just had the lowest level of turnout in this country since the 1800s.
So look, the story here is, the way I see it is a story of two political realignments.
You've got the realignment in America, where Trump is arguably expanding his electorate.
He's winning over Hispanic Latino voters.
He's winning over African-American voters.
He's doing really well in small towns, in flyover country, and so on.
He's giving them the messages that they want to hear.
He's going to build the wall on the southern border.
He's going to put American interests first.
He's going to stand up to China, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the British Conservatives, who kind of won over a very similar coalition, more working class, more dependent upon people who might not have passed through the colleges and universities, but then completely lost all those voters by failing to give them actually what they wanted.
So I think, as you said in your opening comments, we can learn a lot actually about American politics from looking at the UK.
And I think the lesson that you would learn is the British Conservatives have shown you how not to handle a political realignment.
I mean, that is the story here.
That's the basic story.
What were they thinking?
I mean, why?
Obviously, people are so upset about.
It's a big change to leave the EU.
Brexit was a big deal.
They're so upset about immigration.
What are they getting out of it that they won't make a change?
Well, look, I can tell you, I gave a number of presentations over the last few years to some of our prime ministers, including Boris Johnson.
And one of the things that always struck me when I would leave the number 10 Downing Street and sort of, you know, walk along Whitehall and think about what just happened is for a lot of Conservative elites, I basically think they don't really understand who's been voting for them and why they've been voting for them.
I think the Conservative parliamentary party, the people who dominate the apparatus of the Conservative Party here in Britain, I think they lean much further to the cultural left than their new voters.
They are much more socially liberal than their new voters.
They don't see issues like immigration, gender ideology, woke ideology, the borders as high status issues.
They look down on them.
They see them as low status, as things that are a little bit inconvenient.
Whereas what I would say is what could be more conservative than defending the sex-based rights of women, than defending the rights of children, defending strong borders, defending our way of life.
And the British Tories, I think, have fundamentally lost sight of who they are.
So what I'm trying to say to you, Andrew, is this isn't just a party that has suffered an election defeat.
This is a party that is now in the midst of an existential identity crisis.
It is philosophically, ideologically, electorally lost.
It doesn't really know what it is anymore.
And when I compare and contrast the British Tories with, say, what we've seen at the Republican National Convention this week in Wilwaukee, well, I see a conservative movement that looks ideologically coherent, very unified, very clear about what it wants to do, very clear about how it wants to try and change America, whatever your personal view of Donald Trump and the policies, et cetera.
It looks to me like a pretty united, coherent political party.
And it looks like it has a very strong understanding of who has been voting for it since 2016.
And the British Conservative elite, I don't think, have really studied how their movement has evolved in the same way as the U.S. Republicans have.
When it comes to Islam or Islamism, one of the things I learned by living in England is that when you see a foreign country from far away, you're not really seeing it.
You're just seeing the news.
You're not seeing what daily life is like.
When we read about England here, it looks like it's being taken over.
I don't know if you read that book Submission by Michelle Wheeler Becks about the fall of France.
That's what Britain looks like from here.
Is that an illusion?
I mean, I see Islamic mayors being elected all over.
I see courts forgiving people for beating their wives or hurting their wives because it's their culture or whatever.
And most importantly, the thing that always gets Americans is I see the police dropping by your house if you tweet something untoward.
Is that really the situation or is that anomalous or those anomalous events that are being blown up out of proportion?
Well, without question, we have some very significant challenges related to immigration, multiculturalism, sectarianism, which is mainly now coming from Islamic Muslim-dominated communities.
And I think a collapse of confidence in who we are as a country.
And the way that I would just briefly tell this story is to say Britain is in the midst of an immigration revolution on a scale that we've never seen before.
We've had 4 million people enter the country over the last few years.
We've got the share of the population that is Muslim forecast to reach somewhere between 20 and 25% by the year 2050.
It's currently around 6%, to give you a sense of the growth.
We're forecast, according to the Pew Research Center in North America, which is a very reliable research center, we're forecast to see the largest increase in the absolute number of Muslims in all of Europe over the next 25 years or so.
And over time, basically what you're seeing is the share of the population that is white British is steadily collapsing.
And lots of areas are becoming majority, minority.
And our political elite essentially have committed themselves to this idea of diversity being a new religion.
You cannot question, you cannot criticize diversity and multiculturalism.
But it's very clear that we have a fundamental problem in this country.
I'll give you one example for viewers who might not be familiar with Britain.
One of the big unremarked scandals in this country has been the gang-based sexual exploitation of young white working class girls by Pakistani Muslim gangs.
And I'm not talking about one or two incidents.
I'm talking about industrial scale sexual harassment and rape of young white girls by these organized gangs.
At least until maybe three or four years ago, it was considered taboo to even mention this scandal in elite circles.
And I actually gave a talk at the University of Oxford six months ago where I mentioned it and found a very frosty negative reaction because when you're challenging the elite story that multiculturalism is a success story, you will instantly encounter a very hostile reaction, a kind of a wall of silence, essentially.
Nigel Farage's Rise00:03:22
And that's why Nigel Farage is doing so well in politics at the moment, because at the recent election, you know, Farage, who I think has learned a lot from Trump, by the way, I think he's learned a lot from the stadiums, from watching the rallies, from watching the Republicans campaign.
You know, what Nigel Farage is saying is we need an immediate freeze on all immigration.
We need to be talking openly and honestly about just how segregated many of our communities in this country really are.
We need to take on woke ideology, which none of the big parties here will talk about.
We're not like America.
We do not have a debate over critical race theory.
We do not have a serious debate over gender ideology.
J.K. Rowling's mentioned it a few times, but that's basically it.
We do not have a political entrepreneur, with the exception of Nigel Farage, who's willing to say, we're not going to teach our children that boys can become girls and girls can become boys.
You know, we're not going to teach this idea that Britain historically only ever got things wrong or was only ever evil and never contributed any good to the world.
And I think this is where I think the parallels, the way I see us here is we're probably five years behind where you are in terms of this political debate over not just migration borders, but also the impact and influence of a kind of anti-British woke ideology.
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I was at the RNC for a little bit this week, and the atmosphere was unbelievably unified.
Trump has caught, obviously, some providential luck or whatever you want to call it, by being able to take a bullet and get up and spit it out and have this epic moment of defiance.
Trump is a political genius.
I mean, he has brilliantly engineered his moment.
You know, the old expression, the harder you work, the more luck you have.
That's really what he has done.
He has engineered this moment.
Trump's Political Genius00:12:11
When I talk to my friends in Britain, and I have to say they are as, you know, I'm a novelist.
The people I know are London, you know, artists and people in that cultural thing.
They can't even understand that Trump exists.
I mean, the fact that he exists seems to them a blot on the universe.
And I think there are people who feel that way here, but everybody I talk to in Britain feels that way.
Is there anybody, maybe Nigel Farage or anybody, is there a core that can be ignited and someone who can ignite it that can bring the right into alignment with the people?
Is that a possibility there?
Well, I think that's happening right now, Andrew.
I think what we're living through is an ideological civil war over the future of the British right.
So that is what's happening.
The Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has now said he's standing down.
We're heading into a leadership contest for the future of the Conservative Party.
Whoever becomes leader will have to somehow find a way of reuniting with the people who have just been voting for Nigel Farage.
On the other hand, Nigel Farage fancies his chances at taking over the Conservative Party, like Donald Trump just took over the Republicans.
And so this is going to be the battle for the next five years.
I would say to your friends in London, by the way, they should maybe spend less time in London and more time in some of those working class districts than the eastern flank of England.
Because look, it's the same story.
I don't need to tell Americans this.
This is, you know, hillbilly elegy country, right?
This is working class, rust-belt, northern England, people who often voted for Labor in the past, who often voted for left-wing parties, but have gone through mass immigration, have gone through a kind of liberal globalization that has basically hurt the working class in Western economies, and who are now being told that there's something wrong with them because they're white or they're male or they're straight or they're British or they're Western.
And they've had enough.
And I think those voters are on the move.
And if you look at Nigel Farage's electorate at the election just gone, if you look at the people who are voting for him, and I, you know, I'm an academic, I survey voters all the time.
Their top two reasons for voting for Farage.
Number one was to stop illegal immigration, to stop the growing illegal immigration invasion that we have in this country.
We have more than 120,000 people who have entered Britain illegally over the last five years on small boats from France.
So the top reason for voting for Farage was to stop illegal migration.
The second reason was to lower legal migration, to say, actually, we can't sustain this pace of change.
Our population, Andrew, is growing at its quickest rate since 1948, when a lot of British troops came back from the Second World War and we had a baby boom.
The difference, of course, is the reason the population is increasing now is not because British families are having more kids, it's because mass immigration.
We've got more people coming in from outside, most of them coming in from outside of Europe.
Lots of people from Afghanistan, Nigeria, India, Pakistan.
And I say that because that is a real challenge to the social cohesion of our country, because you're talking about a lot of people that don't always share Western values, that don't always live by Western ways of life, who don't always acknowledge our history and our distinctive culture.
So Farage is really benefiting from that.
And what he's hoping, to answer your question, is he can realign the right around a more Trumpian brand of conservatism because he's saying something similar to Trump.
What he's saying is liberal conservatism, maybe a kind of Mitt Romney conservatism in America or even a Nikki Haley type of conservatism, hasn't really met the moment in terms of what voters are looking for.
And actually what voters are looking for is something quite different.
You know, they're not supportive of the forever wars.
They want economic policy that's a bit more patriotic, a bit more focused on putting the interests of the national population first.
They're very anxious over migration.
They want to take on the woke.
They don't want their kids to be indoctrinated in schools, etc.
And I think, in a way, the philosophical battle that I think Trump has clearly won in the US, right?
Looking at the RNC, looking at JD Vance as his pick, he's completely consolidated his position on the right.
But that battle here, I think, has only just got going.
So we are very much back where maybe America was in 2015, 2016.
When you look across the pond and you look at America, where do you see if you were coming over to warn us not to become like you?
What can we do?
Where do you see the real danger?
What do you see that Americans should be thinking about on the right to break free of the stranglehold of this incredibly wrong-headed philosophy?
Well, I think it's a great question.
It looks to me, firstly, as though Republicans have a very have a stronger understanding of who is voting for them and why people are voting for them.
So the first kind of piece of advice would be don't lose touch with that, because that's what the British Conservatives have done and they've suffered the consequences.
And I think that partly speaks to a second point, which is ensuring that you give sufficient voice in the institutions and the political parties and the national culture to people who represent the average voter on a lot of these issues.
I mean, the reason the British Conservatives lost their way, the reason much of the political elite here in Westminster, where I'm talking to you from, have lost their way is because they've become far too homogenous.
They've all gone to the same universities.
They've all gone to the same private schools.
They all live in Oxbridge, London.
You know, they live within two miles of one another.
They basically lost touch with the country, right?
And I think that's a really big problem.
And just lastly, if you look at France, if you look at Europe, you look at Germany, look at Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and also Britain.
You know, in many ways, the story is actually of a continent that is sharply moving to the right because the political elite have failed to understand the strength of feeling over immigration.
And I think if Trump, if I were to say to Trump to do anything, I would say, look, you've got to prioritize the border.
You've got to prioritize security around migration.
You've got to prioritize these issues that might not be fashionable in Washington or New York, but voters really do care deeply about and keep the pedal down on the anti-woke stuff.
I mean, I've taken some courage personally.
I work in universities, right?
So I've seen this revolution firsthand.
When I see Americans closing down DEI departments in colleges and universities, when I see members of Congress giving university heads a really tough time, you know, Harvard and Penn and MIT and holding them to account for the anti-Semitism on university campuses, we need to be doing a lot more of that here in Europe because we're not really fighting that fight at all.
You've basically got a toxic alliance between a kind of radicalizing woke left and then also a kind of radical Islamist pro-migration group and the conservatives are getting squeezed out.
So it is a little bit like a well-becked novel in that sense.
You know, you've got a kind of left-Islamist alliance that's kind of working together to undermine the fabric of European societies.
And conservatives, I'll tell you one other thing, conservatives have to find what Donald Trump has clearly displayed, which is courage.
I mean, whatever you think about Trump, I was struck by his reaction to the assassination attempt.
I was like, wow.
I mean, it's a bit like even Mark Zuckerberg, I notice, has even said, you know, that was a badass moment, right?
To actually respond to an assassination attempt with your fist up and say, I'm not going to take this.
I'm going to keep going.
Remarkable response.
I think a lot of leaders in Europe now could learn a lot from that.
Find that courage, that grip to actually take on some of these big issues.
What is the, I mean, when I look at, for instance, the transgender thing where they are sexually butchering children on the basis of essentially a critical theory that has no science behind it.
It's simply like an idea of a professor that popped into her mind.
And I'm sorry, but it's demonic.
I mean, I always joke that if Joseph Mengele had described gender-affirming care to Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler would have been shocked.
He said, who do you think I am, Hitler?
You know, it's like, I just think that this is an amazing thing.
But we have at least been able to strike back here at the Daily Wire.
Matt Walsh made a wonderful film called What is a Woman?
That was a big success film.
It's a great film.
Yeah.
And what do we have that Britain doesn't have?
Is it just the first thing that we're doing?
I think you have, Andrew, I think you have an alternative ecosystem.
Look, my read on this is the legacy institutions are collapsing, right?
And it's the same here.
The BBC is collapsing.
Public trust is falling through the floor.
Viewing figures, listening figures of our flagship programs have collapsed since the vote for Brexit.
Now, what's emerging instead is this new ecosystem.
It is a little bit like the Daily Wire, right?
Except you guys are on a wholly different level.
But it is, you know, it's the YouTube channels, it's the Substacks, it's the alternative media that are basically pushing new ideas and saying, you know, we're not going to take this anymore.
We're actually going to push back.
When it comes to the identity politics, the gender ideology, you know, let me just say to viewers who might not be familiar with Britain, we had a really big review recently of how this kind of sick belief system was taking hold of our healthcare system.
And it was a review by Hilary Cass, a doctor.
It's called the Cass Review, C-A-S-S.
And if you're interested, you should just sit down and read it because she looks at how all of these radical gender theories had found their way into our national health service and how we were basically pushing kids down pathways that were going to fundamentally change the rest of their lives.
And what Hilary Cass concluded, essentially, is that there's no scientific evidence or support for many of the interventions that are being used.
And you can imagine how this was greeted.
People on the left lost their minds and people on the right said, we've been saying this for years.
Thank you.
We now, we feel validated.
But it shouldn't have got to that point, right?
We shouldn't have got to this point where adults had left the room and kids were being given puberty blockers and sent in to have surgery because liberal professionals and wanted to make themselves feel morally righteous and wanted to make themselves feel special.
And what alarms me more than anything is we have completely, you know, the adults are not even interested in the evidence and the research anymore.
And I say that as a university professor.
I mean, we are embracing ideas, not just gender ideology, but critical race theory that are just completely ignorant of history.
I mean, you know, I'll give you the idea that Britain historically was a toxic, negative, evil influence on the world because, you know, we happen to have some loose association with the slave trade briefly in our history.
You know, even though great scholars, Nigel Bigger being one of them, his great book, Colonialism, has completely destroyed this myth.
But among the elite circles, it's become a kind of new religion.
We have to feel bad about ourselves.
We have to denigrate ourselves constantly.
And so I think America is further along in the fight back because you have this kind of rich alternative ecosystem and you have courageous people who are willing to put their heads above the parapet.
And don't forget, you know, Daily Wire and shows like this, I think as well, what it gives thinkers and it gives thinkers and activists, insulation, you know, professional financial insulation.
And I have a very good friend here in Britain, David Goodhart.
He's written many good books, The Road to Somewhere being his most popular book.
And he made the argument, you know, you need that insulation if you're going to take on the cultural consensus.
Because if you don't have that insulation, you know, they'll come after everything.
They'll try and destroy your livelihood.
They'll try and destroy everything you have.
That's one of the reasons I've been doing so much on Substack and other places, because if you're going to challenge this elite consensus, as you know, you're going to have to be bulletproof because they're going to come for you.
Challenging Elite Consensus00:01:07
Yeah.
So speaking of which, we're out of time.
Matthew Goodwin, where can people find your writing?
Where would you like them to go to see what you're doing?
Well, thank you.
It's very kind of you, Andrew.
I have a big substack here in the UK, Matt Goodwin Substack.
You'll find it easily online.
And it's very countercultural.
It's challenging a lot of these elite myths that we've been talking about, immigration, gender ideology, among more.
And I seem to be on a mission to get cancelled, Andrew.
So hopefully that doesn't happen.
But a little bit like some members of our royal family who seem to want a mission to get cancelled.
Well, in the words of that great American Bruce Willis, welcome to the party, pal.
It's where all the good stuff is happening.
Matthew Goodwin, thank you very much for coming on.
I hope to get to talk to you again.
We appreciate that, Andrew.
Thanks for your time.
Really interesting, eloquent guy, and also just a warning from a possible future that America has and a future that Donald Trump is fighting very hard to stop, which is a great thing and a great moment for us here.
Another great moment will come on Friday when the Andrew Clavin Show is on the air.