The upcoming by-election in the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton is being touted as a referendum on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Earlier this week the Labour party’s ruling national executive committee blocked the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, widely seen as a potential challenger to Starmer’s prime ministerial position, from standing for the seat.
The Green party is yet to announce its candidate. Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK was widely mocked this week when Reform MP Lee Anderson posted a photo of himself campaigning in the wrong constituency.
But on Tuesday Reform announced its candidate for the election: GB News presenter Matt Goodwin.
Goodwin is a prominent right-wing commentator with a long record of making controversial comments about ethnicity, Islam and Muslims.
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Most contentiously, he has repeatedly insisted that British-born people with immigrant parents are not necessarily British.
His positions on ethnicity and Muslims will likely become a major talking point for his opponents ahead of the 26 February by-election, in a seat where more than one in four voters are Muslim.
But Goodwin cuts an unusual figure for Reform, which is topping national opinion polls. For one thing, he is not a former Tory (the party has seen a spate of high-profile defections from the Tory party in the past few weeks).
But most unusually, St Albans-born Goodwin used to be an academic who studied and wrote on national populism and the far right.
He authored books on the British National Party and the UK Independence Party, which used to be led by now-Reform leader Farage.
Between 2013 and 2015 he even served as an adviser to the coalition government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred.
He left the anti-hatred taskforce in 2015 saying that “the basic message appeared to be that the government was simply not that interested in anti-Muslim hatred”.
Goodwin accused the government of failing to engage with British Muslim communities.
Academic to right-wing politician
But over the next several years Goodwin became increasingly sympathetic to the right-wing politicians he wrote about and now he has become one of them.
In 2023 Goodwin said he was once a “fully paid-up member of the liberal left” but had since changed his ideas.
‘King Charles is a secret Muslim!’: The bizarre things I heard at the Reform party conference
He explained in an interview the following year that he became a “black sheep” among academics for arguing that the Brexit vote should be implemented.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski on Tuesday alleged that Goodwin has a “track record of anti-Muslim bigotry”.
“It tells you everything you need to know that Reform are parachuting in a rent-an-extremist,” Polanski said. “Manchester will show him the door.”
Last year Goodwin argued on social media platform X that being born and brought up in Britain does not mean that people from immigrant backgrounds are necessarily British.
“It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he said.
Goodwin claimed in November that second generation immigrants “are more likely to retain cultural traits and habits from parents”.
The Liberal Democrats branded his remarks as “racist”, which Goodwin strenuously denied.
‘Demographic minority’
That same month Goodwin argued that “the Left would have you believe that anybody can become British, and anybody can become English, the moment they step into this country and get hold of a few papers.”
In fact, he said, “what we have been doing in the UK and across the West is importing people from radically different cultures who retain the beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices from their home countries.”
Around 44 percent of people in Gorton and Denton are ethnic minorities and 79 percent identify as British.
Starmer has been accused of echoing notorious politician Enoch Powell in a speech pledging to slash immigration to avoid the UK becoming ‘an island of strangers’.
It was a desperate attempt to win over Reform voters after a disastrous set of local elections, says Joe Gill pic.twitter.com/lKseomv6WX
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 16, 2025
In July Goodwin wrote a Substack piece predicting that “White Britons will become a minority in this country in the year 2063”, calling it a “demographic crisis”.
But his definition of white British excluded anyone with an immigrant parent, including King Charles – whose father was born in Greece.
Back in 2013 Goodwin argued that “few serious commentators cling to the bankrupt idea that Islamophobia is not an issue or is the product of oversensitive British Muslims”.
Yet last year, speaking on GB News, he branded the term Islamophobia “problematic”.
And earlier this month he called Islamophobia a “highly politicised and ill-defined concept”.
‘Fundamentally opposed to British values’
In 2024 Goodwin attacked the notion that among Muslims, “radicals and fanatics – along with their pro-Hamas, antisemitic, and anti-democratic views – only represent a fringe minority”.
Instead, he claimed, “millions of British Muslims – millions of our fellow citizens – hold views that are fundamentally opposed to British values and ways of life”.
Last June Goodwin asserted that “the rape gangs scandal is absolutely a Pakistani-related problem”.
He said this was because “white people are disproportionately underrepresented in this crime and Pakistanis are hugely over-represented.”
On 2 January this year Goodwin declared that “the ruling class in the UK is moving to shut down public debate about Islam”.
He said the Labour government is trying to “smuggle” the concept of Islamophobia “into law, policy and regulation”.
In fact the Labour government’s proposed definition of anti-Muslim hatred is non-statutory, meaning it will not be a legal definition.
Nevertheless, with Labour crashing in the polls and Reform riding a popular wave that shows no sign of dissipating, Goodwin could see himself representing a constituency with a high proportion of Muslim residents.
The topic of religion and ethnic background was absent when he launched his campaign in the northern city.
Goodwin told a crowd in the constituency on Tuesday that the by-election was “a chance for hard-working, law-abiding people, taxpaying people from this seat to have their say on Keir Starmer and to make political history”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
