The Truth About Suicide of a Nation
The book that is now under attack from all sides - and an invitation to join me live
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EVENT. Inner Circle and Paid Subscribers are invited to join Matt Goodwin LIVE on the Substack App for an exclusive discussion about his new book and the reaction to it on Monday, March 30th, at 18.00/6pm UK time. This will be a final discussion point before moving on to other topics. We hope to see you there!
Suicide of a Nation has just rocketed into the Amazon charts as the sixth most bought book in Britain this week.
It has now entered the realm of Jamie Oliver cookbooks and biographies of Harry and Meghan. It’s sold roughly 10,000 copies in its first week and looks set to become a major reference point in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Wherever I’ve taken Suicide of a Nation on tour - in recent days to packed-out events in Whitstable, Halifax, Tewkesbury, and Weymouth - it has completely sold out (if you’d like me to speak at an event drop me a line).
The first print run of the signed Founder’s Edition sold out in two hours; the second in one day; and the third and final run of limited copies arrives today.
Once those are gone there really will be no more (order here).
Suicide of a Nation, put simply, is clearly connecting strongly with the country. It’s connecting with the forgotten majority of hardworking, tax-paying, decent British people who have simply had enough of what is happening to the country they love.
But it is also true that the book has faced a frenzied, intense backlash.
While surging into the bestseller charts and sparking enormous debate, the book (and I) have come under an enormous wave of extraordinary and unhinged criticism - much of it from notorious left-wing activists.
As I write in the Daily Mail this morning, my critics are currently hate-bombing the book’s Amazon page with one-star reviews, trying to put people off from reading the truth about what is really happening in Britain.
Others, entirely predictably, claim the book is ‘racist’, ‘divisive’, ‘toxic’, ‘irresponsible’, and ‘incendiary’, when, in reality, it is none of those things.
Calling for an immediate halt to mass immigration, calling to control our borders, and calling to leave the European Convention on Human Rights might all be policies that are loathed by the chattering classes at literary festivals, but they remain very popular among the forgotten majority of hardworking, decent people in this country.
Few of my critics have even addressed my argument about what is happening to the British and the English people, and what will happen in the years ahead.
Most, instead, prefer to seize on what they claim are inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and even the absurd, categorically untrue notion that parts of the book were somehow “written by artificial intelligence” (AI)! It reminds me of when the left used to claim that the only reason people voted for Brexit was because they were duped by big tech.
My critics cannot believe, for example, my claim that in many places in Britain today, such as Leicester, Luton, Slough, and much of London, a majority of children no longer speak English as their main language.
But actually this is true - and the official data, had they bothered to look, proves it.
In Leicester, last year, 56 per cent of children spoke a language ‘known or believed to be other than English’.
In secondary schools, it’s 53 per cent; in primary schools it’s a scarcely believable 59 per cent. In many other areas it is even higher.
While my critics would rather ignore these statistics, and prefer we not talk about them at all, many people look at them with a sense of dread.
What, they quietly ask, are our politicians doing to the country we love?
While I am happy to confirm I analysed some of the data through artificial intelligence (AI), I was careful to check this against the official data sets.
This is now standard in the world of research and critics who claim otherwise, many of whom I note have never conducted a major research study or even written a book, are being disingenuous at best.
We are living in the year 2026 - not 2016. Using AI to assist with research is not the same thing as using AI to write a book — just as using a calculator doesn’t mean you didn’t do the maths. I even include a reference to AI in the book’s footnotes.
In fact, I go even further in the book.
Those same official data sets, such as the latest census, tell us there are now at least a million people in England and Wales who cannot speak English well or at all. One million! Not to mention there are large numbers of people among us who openly refuse to embrace a UK, British, or English identity, which I also discuss in the book.
How is it right or fair that the British people are being forced to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on ‘translation services’ in the National Health Service and other public institutions? And how on earth can we hold a nation together if large numbers of people within that nation do not speak the language, which in turn supports a shared culture, identity, sense of collective memory, and way of life?
Like millions of others, I worry we are now losing these things.
This book - my eighth - comes from years of work — from speaking to people across the country, from analysing long-term trends, from a detailed and robust report and, most of all, from witnessing first-hand the deep and legitimate concerns that millions of people on these islands feel are being dismissed or ignored.
Every claim in this book, every argument, is grounded in official statistics, real-world evidence, and a considerable body of research and experience.
The core demographic projections that I present in the book - showing what will happen to Britain in the years ahead if we do not urgently change course - have been peer-reviewed by well-known and respected expert demographers.
I even recruited the help of a journalist and proof-reader to review the book, with the goal of sparking a major national debate about the demographic changes that are reshaping, or even replacing, the country we once knew.
And I am delighted to see this debate is now happening, from one city to the next, from one town to the next, from one village to the next. And for the next six months, I will be on tour with the book, ensuring this debate happens everywhere.
Now, have a small number of historical references in the book, for example to what the Roman statesmen Cicero and Livy said, in Latin, 2,000 years ago, turned out to be imperfect? Yes. And those will be corrected.
For instance, it appears I was incorrect to suggest that Ancient Rome’s Cicero once said the state should begin “with the people closest to us”. What Cicero actually said was Salus populi suprema est lex, which means the good of the people should be the supreme law of the land. If only we had politicians today who felt the same way.
But this is what we are talking about when it comes to my politically-motivated critics - minor imperfections being used to try and discredit a major argument about what is happening to Britain and what will happen if we do not change course.
Others even complain that I dared to include references to my own Substack articles in the book’s footnotes. Yes, I did - and proudly.
Because this happens to be one of the only newsletters in Britain where you will find detailed, original work on what is actually happening to our population and why millions of people feel so frustrated with the established political class.
Much of this work is not only original but openly counter-cultural. I am proud of it. We have built a serious body of work that openly pushes against the tide in Westminster and the universities. My left-wing critics would not have had a problem had I relied on dodgy, biased articles from The Guardian or the BBC.
Still others have feebly sought to weaponise the fact that I decided not to release it through a mainstream publisher. Yet I did so deliberately.
Because after writing seven books with the established publishers - many of which have been taken over by wokery and ‘sensitivity readers’ - I know for a fact they would have edited, diluted, and censored Suicide of a Nation to such an extent that it would have said nothing meaningful at all.
In the narrow, groupthink world of mainstream publishing, authors are simply not allowed to rail against the broken consensus, especially when it comes to taboo topics such as mass immigration, multiculturalism, Islamism, and the grooming gangs - all of which I discuss at length in the book.
Typically, when you write a book in mainstream publishing it is handed to a young, Oxbridge-educated editorial assistant who often works overtime to dismantle, censor or ‘rephrase’ anything that might challenge the narrow liberal progressive consensus.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw a mainstream publisher not just commission but seriously get behind a book that was critical of immigration, or transgender ideology, or Islamism, or made the case for putting the nation first?
What my critics loathe is that I am not only writing against this narrow groupthink but I have also stepped outside the established institutions, meaning I can say whatever I want, write whatever I want, and so cannot be controlled or censored.
So let’s be clear about what’s happening here.
My critics are nit-picking over quotations, footnotes, and publishing because they do not want to engage with the substantive argument of the book.
A book which - unlike any other - shows how and why the disastrous policies of mass immigration, broken borders, unchecked Islamism, sectarianism, and ‘two-tier multiculturalism’ are rapidly destroying what is left of our country.
My critics would rather debate whether a quote is perfectly worded or why I pursued an alternative publishing strategy than confront what millions of ordinary people can already see with their own eyes and feel in their hearts.
We are losing our country.
The white British will soon be a minority. The foreign-born and their descendants will soon become a large majority. Islam is already on its way to becoming the largest and most powerful religion in Britain. There are already millions of people among us who do not speak our language, do not embrace our identity, do not contribute to our economy, and do not even like or respect our way of life. And at the same time the hardworking British majority is finding its free speech and free expression restricted by a political class in Westminster that no longer tolerates dissent.
The British people are not idiots. They can see what is happening around them.
They can see they are being subjected to profound, unprecedented, destabilising, and deeply alarming demographic changes which the politicians in Westminster refuse to acknowledge or manage, and for which there is absolutely no democratic consent.
Nobody voted for Britain and England to be demographically transformed, if not demographically replaced, within the next 74 years. Did you?
So the real question is not whether a footnote or historical quote could have been phrased differently. It is whether the facts and trends I set out in the book are real.
Are many of our communities changing beyond all recognition? Yes. Have our public institutions been hijacked by left-wing activists? Yes. Are millions of British people being treated like second-class citizens? Yes. Is the only majority group that Britain has ever known on track to be replaced within just a few decades? Yes.
This is why Suicide of a Nation is resonating. This is why it has soared to the top of the bestseller charts. This is why tens of thousands of people are already reading it.
Not because of a quote or footnote. But because they recognise the grim reality that I document in the book, its title, and front cover. Our so-called leaders, for reasons I explain, have very clearly decided to commit national suicide.
And I for one think the British and the English people deserve a serious conversation about that reality and whether they want it — not a distraction.
This is why I wrote Suicide of a Nation and this is why I urge you all to read it.
Inner Circle and Paid Subscribers are invited to join Matt Goodwin LIVE on the Substack App for an exclusive, final discussion about the book and reaction to it on Monday, March 30th, at 18.00/6pm UK time. This will be our final discussion point before moving on to other topics. We hope to see you there!
Matt, it seems much of the criticism on the right stems from the fact you correctly acknowledge the big issues facing us - demographic replacement and the Islamification of Britain - but refuse to propose policies to address it. Halting mass immigration is not enough. You have attacked those who advocate for remigration for being extreme but without remigration how do we stop what you oppose? It doesn’t add up. It’s not extreme to suggest the Boriswave go home. They weren’t wanted, the British people voted explicitly against more migration in 2019. It’s only fair and reasonable to reverse the policies the British people voted against.
The establishment is trying to build a cordon sanitaire around you and Reform because you violate the "Ignorance is Strength" maxim of Orwellian doublethink. The last thing our elites want is an informed public that is no longer taken in by official narratives.
Your role in political life is important and your reach is growing - were it otherwise they would ignore you - so the brickbats will continue. See them as proof you matter in public life.