Review: Suicide of a Nation. Immigration, Islam, Identity, by Matt Goodwin.

‘I think it's going to become one of the most important books in contemporary history’. So states the author of this self-published polemic, the GB News presenter, Matt Goodwin. And he does not reserve such hyperbole for his self-appraisal. This is a book in which almost every sentence seems to be underlined twice. If it were an audiobook, it would be deafening.

Goodwin sums up his argument in five words on page 2: ‘We are losing our country’. This, he writes, is because of a ‘deliberate and sustained transformation of the only majority the country has ever known—the White British people—and hence the transformation of the country itself’. This emphasis upon white skin pigmentation as an enduring basis of national continuity is repeated throughout the pages of the book. Even holders of British passports who are not white are suspected as cultural invaders because ‘they cannot have the same instinctive, emotional connection to our identity, history and landscape as those whose families have been here for generations’ (p. 26). Quite what an instinct to appreciate the South Downs landscape or an emotional capacity to connect to the England football team might be is never explained by Goodwin. Indeed, I sense that his view would be that unless such claims immediately resonate you are almost certainly part of the miserable traitor elite who are too insensitive to notice that ‘[y]ou walk down a street you once knew and no longer recognise it. You visit the place where you were born and now feel like a stranger. You hear languages that are not your own. You see customs and cultures you do not share’ (p. 2). Well, I walk through the streets of the area of north-west London in which I grew up with a certain pleasure in the vibrancy and diversity that was largely absent in the drabness of my boyhood. I enjoy hearing the buzz of languages and encountering diverse customs, not because I am a member of a cultural suicide cult, but because I find it hard to feel like a stranger amongst other human beings and do not require their skin to be of a certain colour to calm my nerves.

This book belongs to a long tradition of catastrophe literature, going back to ancient millenarianism, in which the fear that expected norms will be overturned (from the Latin catastropha and Greek katastrophe for a sudden overturning) is a source of grave anxiety. For such writers, the civilised world stands perilously on the verge of a precipice that only they and their allies can perceive. Catastrophe literature has tended to gain prominence in periods of rapid social change in which lines of strict classification and differentiation are destabilised. The turbulent interwar years were replete with books and tracts foretelling the collapse of civilisation, the most famous being Oswald Spengler's dense Nietzschean-inspired tome, The Decline of the West, first published in Vienna in 1918 and in English in 1926. Like Goodwin, Spengler was a drop-out from academic life who preferred the public exercise of his own unedited anxieties to empirical rigour. Spengler's claim that ‘[i]n place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman’ is a template for a theory of history that regards social change as an unbearable crisis; a loss of grounding which, for Spengler, entailed a Faustian surrender to ascendant commercialism at the expense of atrophying custom.

Goodwin's sense of loss is couched in the language of ethnic nationalism, owing much to the French far-right nationalist Renaud Camus's 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, in which he states that ‘the flow of migrants has taken such proportions that immigration has become a misnomer for what it is; it is more akin to an invasion, a migratory tsunami, a submerging wave of ethnic substitution’. The notions of replacement and substitution, implying cultural erasure, conjure a powerful imagery of a population being literally eliminated. Goodwin and other proponents of the great replacement theory seem to be frightening themselves and whoever will listen to them with fantasies of a population forced against its will to accept Sharia law and speak a foreign language, but the evidence of this happening relies upon the same kind of delusion that led a US presidential candidate to claim that immigrants are eating people's pet dogs and cats. In the hope of making his argument seem plausible, Goodwin promiscuously misreads official data. For example, he confuses figures showing that large numbers of school students speak a language as well as English with a threat of the extinction of the English language. Over 100 of the world's 195 nations have more than one official language. Goodwin might find this horrifying, but I suspect that most people are aware that the British culture he claims to want to preserve is a product of many distinctive languages, religious traditions and coexisting cultural traditions. Why is it that nationalists always have such poor memories?

Perhaps this is not a book that should be judged on its empirical detail. In a debate on GB News (27 March 2026), Andy Twelves accused Goodwin's book of containing numerous ChatGPT-generated factual errors, incorrect quotations and distorted statistics. The author responded that he intended to correct these errors within forty-eight hours. (I would urge him to take a little longer and get it right this time.) But even though Goodwin's catastrophic arithmetic does not add up, his rhetoric of national suicide should be taken seriously. The claim that ‘we are losing our country’ will undoubtedly appeal to many distressed readers, unsettled and affronted by the accelerated pace of change imposed upon them by the globalisation of markets, emergence of technologies capable of displacing human skills, flattening out of status identity markers and demise of the welfare safety net protecting the most vulnerable. The idea that these social disruptions result from too many people having the wrong skin colour, being monolingual English speakers or practising the Christian faith (around 6 per cent in the UK according to the latest national survey) is plainly crass. But Goodwin is aiming at a nerve that is triggered by feelings rather than verifiable evidence, and in that sense, it will not matter to many of the book's most enthusiastic readers that so much of it reads like the ramblings of a pub bore. Taking on Goodwin's arguments calls firstly for a serious political endeavour to help people make sense of a society in which they feel lost, and secondly for a progressive strategy which celebrates the richness of culture and opens up feasible solutions to the social challenges that the magical thinking of ethno-nationalism can never provide. Such a project appeals to the dynamism of democratic agency rather than the enfeebling fatalism of Goodwin's lengthy national suicide note.

Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, by Matt Goodwin. Northstar (self-published). 210 pp. £12.99