Another long post from me but Goodwin needs to be challenged.
At the heart of the DM piece is the Great Replacement Theory - a far-right, white supremacist conspiracy theory. No surprise that he’s supported by Tommy Robinson. Speaking on GB News in April 2025, Goodwin praised Renaud Camus as a “very important and influential French intellectual”. Camus is the originator of the conspiracy theory, which holds that elites are colluding to replace white Europeans with Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.
He claims that both Labour and Tory are actively encouraging “the forces” i.e. Muslim migrants to transform Britain.
He claims that the real cause of “our national unravelling” is a new ruling class that no longer believes in the nation, no longer values its historic majority and no longer really cares about the continuity of the country and its people.
He says that Britain cannot continue to tell newcomers they should retain their distinctive identities and cultures while telling the historic majority to jettison theirs.
Nobody is telling anybody they should do anything of the kind, only that one can live in a country without having to jettison one’s faith and cultural identity. In my opinion, this has made post-war Britain culturally richer not poorer. We don’t own a country. We are merely custodians for the relatively short time we have and things change.
Part of Britain’s “success”, why it became a wealthy nation, was through colonialism. It imposed its own faith and cultural identity on many nations around the globe, exploited natural resources and people, forcibly enslaved people with brown skins to make Britain wealthy.
What did the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia, India and New Zealand thought about white Christian settlers bringing their “distinctive identities and cultures” to their lands to become, in some countries, the dominant culture? It is often that continuing exploitation by wealthy nations which leads to the mass displacement of poor people. What is this latest war on Iran about if not oil? 3.2 million Iranians displaced needing sanctuary somewhere.
One can take Goodwin’s piece paragraph by paragraph and see where he is twisting the truth, for example:
He claims that a More in Common poll showed that nearly “half of Britons feel ‘like a stranger in my own country’." making it sound as though the poll was all about migration.
To correct what he wrote … 44% of Britons say they sometimes feel like they are strangers to those around them … and that it is due to factors including that:
… financial insecurity is one of the strongest predictors of whether Britons feel disconnected from society: two-thirds (67 per cent) of those who say that they struggle to make ends meet feel disconnected, compared to 37 per cent of those who describe themselves as financially comfortable. In focus groups, Britons of all backgrounds often share how the cost of living has deepened their sense of isolation, making socialising unaffordable.
That is nothing to do with migration and all to do with austerity. I would urge people to look at the survey and not believe Goodwin’s very selective interpretation:
www.moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/research/social-cohesion-a-snapshot/