Chilling but familiar. Having just retired from being CEO of a Unilever owned tech startup, I have decided I won't put myself forward for Non-exec or trustee positions, or take up an academic position because I am no longer willing to self-censor my rational, evidence-based, caring and responsible opinions on migration, gender identity, false accusations of racism and the celebration of obesity (that leads to more deaths a year than smoking and consumes 20% of the NHS budget). I don't want to be labelled as a racist, transphobe, fascist, Daily Mail reader etc and sacked. So what is being lost? I think my CV stacks up OK. Founder, investor, director in five successful tech start-ups. Line management experience in Development, Services, Sales and Marketing. Country manager and regional VP. CEO of a tech start-up funded by a Top 100 company, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Visiting Fellow in health at a Russell Group university, founder and CEO of a successful Community Interest Company, lifelong champion and sponsor helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds take their place at the top table, Masters graduate in major projects from Oxford University and a valued speaker and advisor on how to avoid failure in major projects. That’s a useful bag of experience to share and not a bad track record for someone born in Dagenham who started his career in the docks and a car factory. I have no desire to hang-up my guns. Just the opposite, I feel an urgent calling to help organisations with the many challenges they face from our stumbling social, economic, and political system. But I can’t do that if I am bound and gagged by a movement that has found a way to outlaw valid, intelligent, responsible, deeply thought-out opinions. And, when I see the power HR and Corporate Communications is exercising through ESG and EDI, I am not sure I can help. To be honest, by the time I retired I felt organisations were losing interest in serving their clients and society. And, for their own employees, it would be more realistic to classify them as agents of oppression.
The thing that depresses me about the whole EDI area (& by extension ESG) is that it is not evidence driven, it is belief driven. As you know, I am active in this field because I thought people wanted to see change.
But increasingly, the reality I see on social media (& to some extent in real life), is that evidence is only useful when it backs up your beliefs and is ignored when it contradicts beliefs. As a professional statistician, I find this incredibly offensive in the first place but worse, it makes me feel that actually people don't want change, all they want is a chance to "flaunt their luxury beliefs" as Matt would say.
It's not necessarily an HR issue. I've worked with clients where the HR managers and analysts are evidence driven but they struggle mightily to get the engagement of the board who are far more worried about the PR angle. Few such boards will have the courage to stand alone against the prevailing (& misguided) EDI, ESG wisdoms of their peers.
Your skills and rational intelligence are needed now more than ever. The organizations stumbling from our corrupted social, political and economic system desperately need your guidance. So I wish you you the best of luck and take some comfort that your out there - fighting!
It’s a challenge Ken. I’m a trustee of a national charity that prides itself on rational, science-based thinking but is left/liberal with largely group-think amongst trustees and the exec team. I’m trying to position myself as a key contributor to more diverse thinking, but was told that heterodox views were tantamount to being alt right. Witnessing the way Matt Goodwin was treated at Conway Hall, I’m not optimistic that speaking out and trying to influence strategy/policies is going to be a rewarding experience!
Tragic, keep on trying but my experience is that “resistance is futile”. That’s why I set up and personally funded a Community Interest Company to bring trade and A level students together before the academic stream disappear into the “elite” silo of university. It has been a great success, Take a look. https://www.buildaplane.co.uk
It looks great Ken, important to try and influence the future for young people, and then leverage off the story to make a wider impact.
Meanwhile, there are moves afoot to create a space for heterodox thinkers - though whether it will come to anything who knows! I’m going to the O2 event.
Totally sympathize. You won’t be the only person doing the same thing as more and more people with talent but with the wrong experience just disengage from the social and cultural life of the country. Who would now volunteer to engage in the public square - charities, governing boards, political parties, even the armed forces? If the good people stay away, who is left in charge?
I agree. I was walking the SW Way with an old undergraduate friend who was CEO of a global engineering firm until he retired. He is now Deputy Chair on a Government board and he told me he is giving up next year for the same reasons I won’t be starting. The board has become dominated by EDI matters that are not relevant to its purpose.
A great piece Matt, I was totally shocked by last Saturdays mass demonstration in London. It didn’t feel like Britain to me. A clear example of what happens when the societal changes you examine come to fruition.
London isn’t Britain any more on any day of the week, shamefully. As a certain Midlands politician observed in 1968; (& thus immediately “cancelled” for the rest of his life) “It ain’t gonna be pretty” or more elegant wording to that effect.
That it is clearly courageous for Mr Goodwin to state these entirely rational and reasonable views simply indicates the mess we're in. It's up to all of us who agree with him to call this obscene dogma out for the deranged, dangerous nonsense it is - and keep at it. Some of those who have subscibed to this self-destructive insanity are, at last, beginning to doubt it (notwithstanding their own sanctimonious righteousness).
This why the 'Conservative' party needs demolition, because it has given in to the Left, it is no longer Conservative, not even slightly. Hold your noses for a Labour government for a few years while real conservatives find their backbones.
Your gift, Matt, is to be able to clarify and articulate phenomena that I am sure so many have sensed - but not necessarily fully understood - over the last ten to fifteen years. However, given that the outlook implied by this analysis is dire, and if as you demonstrated in your SDP conference presentation the political space is so significant, is there no opportunity in the short time available before the next election, to assemble some sort of oppositional coalition to at least gain a political foothold at Westminster? I know the question is naive considering our FPTP system and the capture of most of the media, but can we afford five more years of this direction of travel with little or no political restraint?
I believe that of a party that was opposed to the uniparty politics of mass immigration, net zero, the WHO takeover and all the rest of the nonsense took to the streets, handing out leaflets, talking to voters, using all means possible to get its message across, there would be massive support - it wouldn’t need the MSM if it went to voters directly. Why aren’t the smaller parties doing this, why aren’t they banding together with a clear, concise and unified message? If 80% are against the toxic politics Matt Goodwin outlines above, then a party that worked directly with the public, campaigning on the streets against such toxicity, would win a general election in a landslide. But with only a year until a general election, there is still no opposition, certainly not an opposition that is doing anything significant.
80% apparently said yes to more government intervention recently in an opinion poll. Lockdown has created the most unproductive people with about 5.4m on long term disability benefit. While the millenniums in interviews are asking what can the job offer them rather than the other way around. Interesting times.
I was at the debate and concur with all that Matt says. I am furious - although not surprised - he was not invited to the post debate dinner. DA had supporters in the front seats of the debating hall with whom he pulled faces and sneered about the things that Matt was saying. One of his cronies claimed in the q&a that ‘ordinary’ people don’t feel afraid to speak out about their contrarian beliefs to left/lib narrative - he clearly has no idea how much self censorship people like me do ALL the time. And I’m
A graduate and produced documentaries for the BBC for 10 years before I escaped iits poisonous clutches! Thank you Matt for your well researched, well argued and courageous stance. You make us - the reasonable, rationale people who think out of the box for themselves - feel sane!
From employees I have spoken to, there is a deep resentment of being forced to share toilets with the opposite sex or made to endure in house courses which tell them how racist they are. As you've said, a top down ideology imposed by a minority.
I hope this link works. The Liberal Hivemind is on You Tube and this video is of an insane 'white fragility' consultancy. Honestly it looks like a parody but it isn't. Like so many other things we have to see every day.
And thanks to Matt for going into the Lions Den. Or Maximus in Gladiator. Undoubtedly you are the most articulate commentator of our times. Up there with Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Rufo.
Thank you, Matt, for standing up to these arrogant people…again. What is categorised as ‘right wing’ is just average and what most people believe in. I’m sorry you have to take the brunt of what these blind people hurl at those who don’t agree with them. Most people in this country agree with YOU. Please keep pushing at that door. It’s unpleasant for you but that’s because you are shaking up their ‘ecosystem’, to quote Adam Boulton. Now is the time to keep speaking up as it really feels a bit like like ‘turning away’ when things went nasty in Germany.
Hoorah! Matt finally wakes up to the work that worldwide Marxism has been doing in the shadows in recent years through its various proxies in the west, gently pushing poisonous narratives. The evil starts with China and its control/payments to the UN, WEF, WHO etc, then moves onto those behind the 'Climate Change' scare, which has been massaged for decades. October fogs, very common this time of year, are now 'superfogs'. FIRST RULE: stop calling the useful idiots who've fallen for all of these things 'elites', they are anything BUT elite, they are colossal fools, ready to believe anything from children choosing their gender to UFOs or that if we keep feeding the Islamic crocodile, we'll all be safe.
'They' are only running (or ruining) the show on behalf of Marxism and Islamism. Note how in recent years the utterly treacherous Tories have said one thing at election time then done the complete opposite when in power. They have let in far more unvetted, criminal, violent migrants than Labour ever did. And you have to be pretty thick to believe CO2 is a danger to the planet or that hyped up, exaggerated 'climate change' is something to worry about as Iran tries to get nuclear weapons.
As you say, it’s not that your political and social viewpoint has changed, it is that the left liberal progressive movement has taken a disastrous lurch down a rabbit hole. The difference between you and them is that you are clear-headed and intelligent enough to recognise what is happening in our society.
If the radical woke progressives get their way, Western society will destroy itself from within.
Thank you Matt for doing what I should be doing. Speaking up and letting the elite realise they will be challenged. I firmly believe that too many of the British are complacent and unwilling to challenge or even think about these issues allowing the New Labour take over of all the institutions. The country needs a new political movement which may be ignited by your endeavours. Hope so. Thank you again.
I didn't see the debate but a lot of the themes you refer to have been on display in Australia over the last few months for the Voice referendum. Have you been following this?
At one point, it looked like they would be the 3rd anglophone country after UK/USA in 2016 to reject their "betters" 52-48 but in the end the margin was 60-40 NO.
The margin of defeat though didn't make a blind bit of difference to the entirely predictable reaction of the Australian establishment which had copied & pasted wholesale the Remain/Clinton playbooks. The Aussie "New Elite" is no different from the UK's
You really ought to look at this because I can see something like the Voice proposal coming to Britain in some form.
I have a son-in-law in Australia, have visited 4 times, and I care about what happens there. I am a member of the IPA, who happily send me their stuff halfway round the world. The Voice was a great result, but as you say, defeat in one battle doesn't stop the elites from waging their war.
Excellent tour-de-force of the profound change in our society during the past dozen years! There's another side to this scenario, accompanying the apparently unstoppable rise and rise of the new elites: the increased atomisation of public discourse, further fuelled by the covid years. More and more people have retreated and opened their own podcasts, video channels, blogs and increasingly chain emails where they also live in a bubble with fewer and fewer recipients. After all, who has the time to listen to all those important podcasts, to watch those videos, to read those blogs, bringing the same arguments, time and time again.
Yes, this is also related by the opinion monopoly of the BBC - their online 'news' reach more smartphone addicts than the print media and their online publications.
Meanwhile, thanks to the ever more degraded education even in those posh public schools, there will be fewer and fewer people capable of actually running the courtly - crumbling infrastructure being just one example: how to fix bridges and roads when nobody knows how, in real life as opposed to the computer screen.
Learned opinion makers in certain august broadsheets like to warn of a situation akin to that in Germany in 1933. I think we're closer to what happened in France in 1789 - those new elites better beware ...
Brilliant assessment as usual Matt. I’ve just ordered Doug Stokes’ Against-Decolonisation as without guys like Goodwin, Kisin, Stokes et al we’d be rootless but it does however feel like plating a lyre while Rome burns.
Chilling but familiar. Having just retired from being CEO of a Unilever owned tech startup, I have decided I won't put myself forward for Non-exec or trustee positions, or take up an academic position because I am no longer willing to self-censor my rational, evidence-based, caring and responsible opinions on migration, gender identity, false accusations of racism and the celebration of obesity (that leads to more deaths a year than smoking and consumes 20% of the NHS budget). I don't want to be labelled as a racist, transphobe, fascist, Daily Mail reader etc and sacked. So what is being lost? I think my CV stacks up OK. Founder, investor, director in five successful tech start-ups. Line management experience in Development, Services, Sales and Marketing. Country manager and regional VP. CEO of a tech start-up funded by a Top 100 company, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Visiting Fellow in health at a Russell Group university, founder and CEO of a successful Community Interest Company, lifelong champion and sponsor helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds take their place at the top table, Masters graduate in major projects from Oxford University and a valued speaker and advisor on how to avoid failure in major projects. That’s a useful bag of experience to share and not a bad track record for someone born in Dagenham who started his career in the docks and a car factory. I have no desire to hang-up my guns. Just the opposite, I feel an urgent calling to help organisations with the many challenges they face from our stumbling social, economic, and political system. But I can’t do that if I am bound and gagged by a movement that has found a way to outlaw valid, intelligent, responsible, deeply thought-out opinions. And, when I see the power HR and Corporate Communications is exercising through ESG and EDI, I am not sure I can help. To be honest, by the time I retired I felt organisations were losing interest in serving their clients and society. And, for their own employees, it would be more realistic to classify them as agents of oppression.
The thing that depresses me about the whole EDI area (& by extension ESG) is that it is not evidence driven, it is belief driven. As you know, I am active in this field because I thought people wanted to see change.
But increasingly, the reality I see on social media (& to some extent in real life), is that evidence is only useful when it backs up your beliefs and is ignored when it contradicts beliefs. As a professional statistician, I find this incredibly offensive in the first place but worse, it makes me feel that actually people don't want change, all they want is a chance to "flaunt their luxury beliefs" as Matt would say.
Nice to see you here Nigel. Sadly, I agree. On ESG and EDI, HR and PR wouldn’t feel the weight of evidence if it fell on them from a great height!
It's not necessarily an HR issue. I've worked with clients where the HR managers and analysts are evidence driven but they struggle mightily to get the engagement of the board who are far more worried about the PR angle. Few such boards will have the courage to stand alone against the prevailing (& misguided) EDI, ESG wisdoms of their peers.
By the way, I note you've retired but please do email me if you want. I have a contact that you might be interested in talking to.
Please don’t be disheartened - the darkest hour is just before dawn and you are certainly needed!
Dear Ken,
Your skills and rational intelligence are needed now more than ever. The organizations stumbling from our corrupted social, political and economic system desperately need your guidance. So I wish you you the best of luck and take some comfort that your out there - fighting!
It’s a challenge Ken. I’m a trustee of a national charity that prides itself on rational, science-based thinking but is left/liberal with largely group-think amongst trustees and the exec team. I’m trying to position myself as a key contributor to more diverse thinking, but was told that heterodox views were tantamount to being alt right. Witnessing the way Matt Goodwin was treated at Conway Hall, I’m not optimistic that speaking out and trying to influence strategy/policies is going to be a rewarding experience!
Tragic, keep on trying but my experience is that “resistance is futile”. That’s why I set up and personally funded a Community Interest Company to bring trade and A level students together before the academic stream disappear into the “elite” silo of university. It has been a great success, Take a look. https://www.buildaplane.co.uk
That's wonderful Ken, what a great project.
It looks great Ken, important to try and influence the future for young people, and then leverage off the story to make a wider impact.
Meanwhile, there are moves afoot to create a space for heterodox thinkers - though whether it will come to anything who knows! I’m going to the O2 event.
https://www.arcforum.com/ideas/a-better-story/ARC-Conference-announcement
Totally sympathize. You won’t be the only person doing the same thing as more and more people with talent but with the wrong experience just disengage from the social and cultural life of the country. Who would now volunteer to engage in the public square - charities, governing boards, political parties, even the armed forces? If the good people stay away, who is left in charge?
I agree. I was walking the SW Way with an old undergraduate friend who was CEO of a global engineering firm until he retired. He is now Deputy Chair on a Government board and he told me he is giving up next year for the same reasons I won’t be starting. The board has become dominated by EDI matters that are not relevant to its purpose.
A great piece Matt, I was totally shocked by last Saturdays mass demonstration in London. It didn’t feel like Britain to me. A clear example of what happens when the societal changes you examine come to fruition.
Lovely to see London's liberal left get a wake up call. Not many Pride flags last Saturday.
London isn’t Britain any more on any day of the week, shamefully. As a certain Midlands politician observed in 1968; (& thus immediately “cancelled” for the rest of his life) “It ain’t gonna be pretty” or more elegant wording to that effect.
I would agree but being a member of the globalist elite I don't want to be debanked.
The UK, unlike the US, has little push back against the elite globalist narrative.
That it is clearly courageous for Mr Goodwin to state these entirely rational and reasonable views simply indicates the mess we're in. It's up to all of us who agree with him to call this obscene dogma out for the deranged, dangerous nonsense it is - and keep at it. Some of those who have subscibed to this self-destructive insanity are, at last, beginning to doubt it (notwithstanding their own sanctimonious righteousness).
This why the 'Conservative' party needs demolition, because it has given in to the Left, it is no longer Conservative, not even slightly. Hold your noses for a Labour government for a few years while real conservatives find their backbones.
It is the stupid party - be gentle.
Your gift, Matt, is to be able to clarify and articulate phenomena that I am sure so many have sensed - but not necessarily fully understood - over the last ten to fifteen years. However, given that the outlook implied by this analysis is dire, and if as you demonstrated in your SDP conference presentation the political space is so significant, is there no opportunity in the short time available before the next election, to assemble some sort of oppositional coalition to at least gain a political foothold at Westminster? I know the question is naive considering our FPTP system and the capture of most of the media, but can we afford five more years of this direction of travel with little or no political restraint?
I believe that of a party that was opposed to the uniparty politics of mass immigration, net zero, the WHO takeover and all the rest of the nonsense took to the streets, handing out leaflets, talking to voters, using all means possible to get its message across, there would be massive support - it wouldn’t need the MSM if it went to voters directly. Why aren’t the smaller parties doing this, why aren’t they banding together with a clear, concise and unified message? If 80% are against the toxic politics Matt Goodwin outlines above, then a party that worked directly with the public, campaigning on the streets against such toxicity, would win a general election in a landslide. But with only a year until a general election, there is still no opposition, certainly not an opposition that is doing anything significant.
80% apparently said yes to more government intervention recently in an opinion poll. Lockdown has created the most unproductive people with about 5.4m on long term disability benefit. While the millenniums in interviews are asking what can the job offer them rather than the other way around. Interesting times.
I was at the debate and concur with all that Matt says. I am furious - although not surprised - he was not invited to the post debate dinner. DA had supporters in the front seats of the debating hall with whom he pulled faces and sneered about the things that Matt was saying. One of his cronies claimed in the q&a that ‘ordinary’ people don’t feel afraid to speak out about their contrarian beliefs to left/lib narrative - he clearly has no idea how much self censorship people like me do ALL the time. And I’m
A graduate and produced documentaries for the BBC for 10 years before I escaped iits poisonous clutches! Thank you Matt for your well researched, well argued and courageous stance. You make us - the reasonable, rationale people who think out of the box for themselves - feel sane!
From employees I have spoken to, there is a deep resentment of being forced to share toilets with the opposite sex or made to endure in house courses which tell them how racist they are. As you've said, a top down ideology imposed by a minority.
Sometimes I'm pleased I retired just in time (2012).
Which might very well account for the reluctance of so many to return to their workplace after periods of illness.
https://youtu.be/bOdWCd68waQ?si=YKGWb71PAPMXHTO9
I hope this link works. The Liberal Hivemind is on You Tube and this video is of an insane 'white fragility' consultancy. Honestly it looks like a parody but it isn't. Like so many other things we have to see every day.
And thanks to Matt for going into the Lions Den. Or Maximus in Gladiator. Undoubtedly you are the most articulate commentator of our times. Up there with Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Rufo.
Had a look at that, ghastly. Americans have swallowed the whole Marxist playbook.
Thank you, Matt, for standing up to these arrogant people…again. What is categorised as ‘right wing’ is just average and what most people believe in. I’m sorry you have to take the brunt of what these blind people hurl at those who don’t agree with them. Most people in this country agree with YOU. Please keep pushing at that door. It’s unpleasant for you but that’s because you are shaking up their ‘ecosystem’, to quote Adam Boulton. Now is the time to keep speaking up as it really feels a bit like like ‘turning away’ when things went nasty in Germany.
Hoorah! Matt finally wakes up to the work that worldwide Marxism has been doing in the shadows in recent years through its various proxies in the west, gently pushing poisonous narratives. The evil starts with China and its control/payments to the UN, WEF, WHO etc, then moves onto those behind the 'Climate Change' scare, which has been massaged for decades. October fogs, very common this time of year, are now 'superfogs'. FIRST RULE: stop calling the useful idiots who've fallen for all of these things 'elites', they are anything BUT elite, they are colossal fools, ready to believe anything from children choosing their gender to UFOs or that if we keep feeding the Islamic crocodile, we'll all be safe.
They are the lite in the sense that they are running the show.
'They' are only running (or ruining) the show on behalf of Marxism and Islamism. Note how in recent years the utterly treacherous Tories have said one thing at election time then done the complete opposite when in power. They have let in far more unvetted, criminal, violent migrants than Labour ever did. And you have to be pretty thick to believe CO2 is a danger to the planet or that hyped up, exaggerated 'climate change' is something to worry about as Iran tries to get nuclear weapons.
I mean elite.
It they are elite in that they usually are the beneficiary’s of the policies they create for the people to adhere too.
We used to say 'lions led by DONKEYS'.
You couldn’t be more right, Matt.
As you say, it’s not that your political and social viewpoint has changed, it is that the left liberal progressive movement has taken a disastrous lurch down a rabbit hole. The difference between you and them is that you are clear-headed and intelligent enough to recognise what is happening in our society.
If the radical woke progressives get their way, Western society will destroy itself from within.
Not invited to dinner after the debate? Were they really that petty?!
Thank you Matt for doing what I should be doing. Speaking up and letting the elite realise they will be challenged. I firmly believe that too many of the British are complacent and unwilling to challenge or even think about these issues allowing the New Labour take over of all the institutions. The country needs a new political movement which may be ignited by your endeavours. Hope so. Thank you again.
I didn't see the debate but a lot of the themes you refer to have been on display in Australia over the last few months for the Voice referendum. Have you been following this?
At one point, it looked like they would be the 3rd anglophone country after UK/USA in 2016 to reject their "betters" 52-48 but in the end the margin was 60-40 NO.
The margin of defeat though didn't make a blind bit of difference to the entirely predictable reaction of the Australian establishment which had copied & pasted wholesale the Remain/Clinton playbooks. The Aussie "New Elite" is no different from the UK's
You really ought to look at this because I can see something like the Voice proposal coming to Britain in some form.
I have a son-in-law in Australia, have visited 4 times, and I care about what happens there. I am a member of the IPA, who happily send me their stuff halfway round the world. The Voice was a great result, but as you say, defeat in one battle doesn't stop the elites from waging their war.
Excellent tour-de-force of the profound change in our society during the past dozen years! There's another side to this scenario, accompanying the apparently unstoppable rise and rise of the new elites: the increased atomisation of public discourse, further fuelled by the covid years. More and more people have retreated and opened their own podcasts, video channels, blogs and increasingly chain emails where they also live in a bubble with fewer and fewer recipients. After all, who has the time to listen to all those important podcasts, to watch those videos, to read those blogs, bringing the same arguments, time and time again.
Yes, this is also related by the opinion monopoly of the BBC - their online 'news' reach more smartphone addicts than the print media and their online publications.
Meanwhile, thanks to the ever more degraded education even in those posh public schools, there will be fewer and fewer people capable of actually running the courtly - crumbling infrastructure being just one example: how to fix bridges and roads when nobody knows how, in real life as opposed to the computer screen.
Learned opinion makers in certain august broadsheets like to warn of a situation akin to that in Germany in 1933. I think we're closer to what happened in France in 1789 - those new elites better beware ...
Don't you start Liz! THEY ARE NOT 'ELITES'! They are simply the useful idiots of Gramsci Marxism.
Brilliant assessment as usual Matt. I’ve just ordered Doug Stokes’ Against-Decolonisation as without guys like Goodwin, Kisin, Stokes et al we’d be rootless but it does however feel like plating a lyre while Rome burns.
We need a full orchestra then!
This is your best piece yet on substack imo
I had to read it 3 times to enjoy real honest commentary on this vile liberal elite
They have brought looking down one’s nose at the peasants to a new level
Brilliant article