Is Matthew Goodwin too rabid even for Reform?

Matthew Goodwin, a former university lecturer who tries to put a respectable intellectual gloss onto Reform’s primitive policies, is the party’s candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election.

Goodwin, who poses as a sort of lost Gallagher brother, is, in fact, from St Albans. He is the son of a senior quangocrat (Dad ran something called the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority), and has been a professional academic since he left university. In other circumstances, he is someone I imagine his colleague Lee Anderson, former Notts miner and Reform UK chief whip, might say has never done a proper day’s work in his bloody life and doesn’t live in the real world.

Before becoming a right-wing firebrand, Goodwin was once quite progressive. But, seemingly suffering from Stockholm Syndrome from studying Ukip and the populist right for decades, he now shares Lee’s views – and that suddenly makes this quintessential southerner, with an address in Hitchin on the ballots, alright. Which he ain’t.

Like Anderson, Goodwin has a knack of saying studiously provocative things that appear designed to attract media attention and more than a little outrage. He seems to enjoy winding up the right people – liberals, and the like.

So it is with his suggestion that you’re ’not always’ British if you are born here and thus have legal British citizenship: the corollary of that is that if you don’t behave like a model British citizen, as prescribed by Nigel Farage, then you’d have your citizenship and your rights take away, including right of abode. That’s pretty chilling.

Rather less frightening but still supremely odd is a proposal he made a couple of years ago to levy higher income tax on families that “don’t have offspring” – such a cold phrase, a notion dressed up in the technocratic phrase “negative child benefit tax”. This is “natalism”, and linked to what he calls a “demographic crisis” because, on some projections, which may or may not come true some way into the future, the UK will cease to be white majority nation sometime around 2060 or 2070 – and that this will be a disaster.

Like most Reform policies, this idea suffers from being both divisive and ill-thought through. You can see the logic. If we support families through child benefit, breakfast clubs, free school dinners and other measures, why not add some sticks to those carrots by penalising those who refuse to breed?

It’s nonsense, of course. Just as no one has kids simply for the child benefit (capped for most of the last couple of decades at two “offspring”), no one is going to leap into procreative lovemaking just to get a tenner a week off their tax bill. Solving the housing crisis would probably help more – but Reform don’t have much to say about that, except “Send ’em home”, conveniently forgetting that we’ve had shortages of decent family housing long before the recent waves of mass migration.

It’s also divisive, and not just between those who want to have children and those who prefer not to, but between those who can and those who, for medical reasons, cannot. Would fostering count? Would “non-British” people be exempt from the “negative child benefit” on the grounds that Reform doesn’t want the non-British to multiply? What if a child dies? Is the benefit then withdrawn and a tax then levied?

Why financially pressure single women to become mothers, adding sexism to racism into the mix? I hate to be personal, but I notice Goodwin himself “only” has one child, according to Wikipedia. Shouldn’t he be going at it like a rabbit to save Britain? He needs to be more like Elon Musk (14 kids), or Jacob Rees-Mogg (six), or Boris Johnson (at least eight).

It’s an awful idea, but a typical one, and another reason to doubt Reform’s capacity to govern. See also their pledges to cut council tax and improve efficiency via the “British Doge”. Reform councils are raising the council tax, saving precious little in the skint local authorities they won, and generally displaying gross incompetence, with the single exception of extremely detailed policies in flags. “Vexillology before people” should be their motto.

Much of the Reform platform is about putting “British” people first. The benefit cuts they want are targeted at “non-British” people. They do want to lift the two-child cap – but only for “British” parents. My interpretation of this is that they don’t want to give the cash to Muslim people, for example, who tend to have larger families.

Yet those people, resident and working here, pay taxes the same as anyone else, and do their bit for the country. Plenty of “British” citizens don’t. It’s not fair, but actually economically damaging to blunt incentives to work by taking Universal Credit away from some non-British people. Would the “British first” principle play to the NHS and schooling? If so, why should they pay any tax?

The big question here for Reform is of course “who is British?” For most purposes today, it is just someone who qualifies for citizenship – who is born in the UK, or naturalised and can get a passport. But Reform UK are suspiciously ambivalent on this, and it would be perfectly possible for them to redefine legal Britishness in a way that starts excluding people.

If, as Goodwin puts it, a “piece of paper” doesn’t necessarily make you “British”, what does? In the words of this would-be MP, “people who were first- or second-generation immigrants are more likely to retain cultural traits and habits from parents […]. Clearly, many integrate successfully, but the fact remains we have British citizens who reject integration in favour of retaining their origin culture. This is as much our failure as theirs, but it is the reality we are living with. It is not ‘far-right’ to think this.”

Maybe not – but what conclusions does such thinking lead to? Goodwin rejects multiculturalism, which is simply a tacit social contract to live and let live; and believes that Englishness has an ethnic element: “I think you can be British and English in terms of nationality, but not English in terms of ethnicity.” That offers a clue: Reform’s prejudices are so deep-set as to infect everything they say and do.

This is why there is good reason to fear Reform’s eagerness to scrap laws protecting human rights, and the decent treatment of every citizen and resident of this country equally under the law. Reform could deprive you of your citizenship, or right to remain in the UK, on the flimsiest and most racist of grounds – and you couldn’t go to court to stop it.

This is what is in the ballot paper in Gorton and Denton, where there is a parliamentary candidate advocating ideas the effect of which would be to turn many of his own constituents into second-class citizens. The implications of that are too appalling to contemplate. That’s why Reform would destroy Britain – and why he must lose his campaign for the seat.