Matt Goodwin is wrong about whiteness and Englishness – but here’s why he has struck a chord with some voters

By John Denham, Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics, University of Southampton

Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, is just one of the rightwing politicians to recently question the “Englishness” of people who aren’t white and born in England. The claim is clearly out of step with reality. Exclusivist views are certainly out there, but in the minds of an increasingly small minority. There is no popular upsurge in narrow ethno-nationalism.

On the other hand, the sudden prominence of such views marks more than the willingness of populist political forces to mobilise polarising ideas about national identities that were once…

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