Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment
The ‘heterodox intellectual’ turned populist is a morbid symptom of the digital age
Some self-promotion I’m afraid. I have an essay on the academic turned radical right propagandist Matthew Goodwin in the latest issue of Prospect.
Goodwin’s type—so-called heterodox intellectual turned populist demagogue—is a morbid symptom of the digital age. To paraphrase Albert Camus, he is an empty prophet for mediocre times. A selection of glossy headshots on Goodwin’s website suggests a foray into party politics could at some point beckon. That was certainly the view of at least one former academic colleague I spoke to. And why not? Goodwin is precisely the sort who could make a name for himself in these strange days. What Goodwin lacks in charisma he makes up for in self-promotion.
And yet, for those of us who once enjoyed his work, Goodwin now cuts a rather pathetic figure, his ideological trajectory recalling the American journalist Dorothy Thompson’s description of the “saturnine man” in her 1941 Harper’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?”: “He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.”
You can read the full piece here.
Lost Boys has been chosen by Prospect as one of its recommended summer reads. It’s nice to get any reviews at all for a book these days. Around 200,000 books are published in the UK each year and a vanishingly small number make the notice of the papers. To visit Waterstones or Foyles is to be hemmed in by what Gordon Comstock once described as ‘eight hundred slabs of pudding’. Therefore I feel privileged to be given a look in at all by the papers for my latest effort. I’m even more gassed about the fact that the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. The Financial Times describes Lost Boys as ‘compelling’; Literary Review as containing ‘vivid reporting’; while the Observer calls it ‘brave, clear and necessary’. Sarah Owen MP writes for PoliticsHome that ‘If you found Netflix’s Adolescence to be eye-opening, then James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys is the perfect companion piece: an in-depth, personal and authoritative account of the spaces where this new misogyny takes hold.’
I’ve also been on a slew of podcasts recently to talk about the book. These include The Story (the Times), New Lines, the New European, Prospect and Byline Times.
To coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre BBC 4 has been showing its excellent documentary The Death of Yugoslavia. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described the events in Srebrenica in 1995 as follows:
‘They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.’
Bosnian Serb forces proudly boasted of their actions as ‘ethnic cleansing’ - mass rape, murder and raising of entire villages was to ensure that Serbs, and only Serbs, could live in Serb-dominated areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The killings were not, as Cambridge scholar Brendan Simms put it in his superb book Unfinest Hour, ‘the by-product of war or civil breakdown’. Ethnic cleansing was in fact ‘the purpose of the war’.
At the time of the massacres an obscure British magazine called Living Marxism – published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) that would later reinvent itself as Spiked – put out sympathetic articles on Radovan Karadzic (the President of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war) while claiming that journalists like the Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy and ITN’s Penny Marshall – who had witnessed the concentration camps set up by the Serb army in Trnopolje in northern Bosnia – were lying. Living Marxism was subsequently sued by ITN and lost, incurring hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages and bankrupting the magazine.
This piece by Jamie Palmer is an excellent overview of the Living Marxism/ITN trial.
When Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and the shelling of Sarajevo, was finally arrested in 2011, [Mick] Hume was still haggling over the number of dead in Spiked. ‘There is no doubt,’ he allowed, ‘that Bosnian Muslims were murdered at Srebrenica. But as has been argued before on Spiked, everything from the numbers involved to the circumstances of their deaths is far more open to question than the standard version of the parable might suggest.?’]
A couple of years earlier, in 1993, the RCP had defended the IRA’s bombing of Warrington that killed two children. ‘We defend the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom,’ a statement from the group said.
Depressingly, Hume and other members of the LM cult suffered no significant career damage following their attempts to take a contrarian position on genocide. Au contraire, it is difficult to turn on the television or radio these days without finding some ghoul from the Furedi cult posing as a ‘thinker’. Claire Fox, IRA apologist and co-publisher of LM at the time it was pumping out glowing profiles of Serbian genocidaires, was even appointed to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson in 2020.
