‘MattGPT and Me’

As some of you may have seen, it has not been a good week for ReformUK’s failed Gorton & Denton by-election candidate, Matthew Goodwin. I read his new book not long after it was released, and discovered a whole range of issues with it. Seemingly AI-generated quotes from Scruton, Hayek, Livy, Cicero and more; a profound misunderstanding of what English as an Additional Language is; and misinterpreted demographic projections that even Goodwin concedes are “very crude”. This has resulted in him earning the nickname, MattGPT – brutally funny.

Goodwin did not take this particularly well, extending the generational crashout he began after losing the by-election to a local left-wing plumber. And, after a flurry of online backlash against him, he agreed to face me in a debate on his own channel, GBNews. The general consensus, across the political spectrum, is that he came out of this debate significantly worse off than the way he went into it, and whatever was left of his credibility was destroyed.

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As a result of our debate, he has lost the support of The Critic, Unherd, The Spectator, The Times, and even GBNews, with contributors labelling him one of their triggered tantrums of the week and laughing at him live on air. He will likely be quietly pushed out of the picture at ReformUK, as a profound embarrassment to them, and I can’t imagine he’ll be taken seriously in the mainstream media ever again.

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This is one of the best ways that we can take on ReformUK; going onto the platforms they enjoy immense privilege on, like GBNews, and confronting and exposing them there. We do not win by remaining in our own echo chambers and sniping at them from afar, and we certainly do not win by adopting their attitudes against the most vulnerable in our society, as some would have us do. That was not what the Labour Party of 1900 was set up for, and it is not what the Labour Party of 2026 should be doing either.

Plenty of research has been done that proves that Labour cannot out-Reform Reform – all it does is shift the Overton window further, and allows them to take their rhetoric to another level. When we confront them with the fact that they’re controlled by corporate interests, that Trump has a leash around Farage’s neck, or the fact that, as Goodwin does, they just lie about objective truths – we win. In the final chapter of Goodwin’s book, there are only a couple of policy suggestions about how the UK can take back control, and the Government has taken most of them up. Food for thought.

During our debate Goodwin attempted to discredit me, raising the fact that I had written for LabourList before. Perhaps if he held himself to the same levels of editorial rigour that LabourList does, he wouldn’t have found himself in this position.

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