What I told NatCon Brussels

Meetings like NatCon Brussels are vital! The movement we are fighting is a worldwide movement and we must become a worldwide movement as well if we want to combat it effectively.

From The European Conservative

By Matt Goodwin, PhD

We must work to build a completely new movement and ecosystem that transcends Left and Right.

This essay was adapted from a speech given at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels on April 16, 2024.

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First, I want to thank the organisers and all of you for being here today. They tried to shut us down, they failed.

As the research shows, radical Left progressives routinely try to shut down and silence those who hold views they disagree with.

Second, I want to begin with a short story because if you’re not from Britain then you probably don’t know who I am.

My name is Matt Goodwin. I’m a university professor and a pollster. I write one of the UK’s biggest Substacks where I take aim at the broken political consensus.

I’m an Englishman and a Welshman. My family come from the steel factories of northern England and the coal mines of South Wales.

My grandfather fought the fascists in the Second World War, in the jungles of Burma. My grandmother was sent from her village in the valleys of south Wales—Llanelli—to sing for the troops during the war to help keep up morale.

That’s when they met, on a boat in the Indian Ocean. They fell completely in love, so much so that when my grandfather finally returned home years later he went straight down to that village in Wales to find the woman he had met on that boat.

He proposed. She said yes. They got married, they had my mother, and then they stayed married for more than sixty years, until they passed away.

They weren’t alive during the Brexit referendum but if they had been then I imagine they would have voted to leave the European Union.

Why? Because like many other people who belonged to the greatest generation, the people who embodied the very best of who we are, they actually believed in Britain.

They believed in our institutions. They believed in the symbols of our nationhood, our national culture, and our ways of life. They knew Britain didn’t get everything right but they did see the good, not just the bad, in our history.

And while they were certainly tolerant and respectful of others, they were also strong—they weren’t easily pushed around by demagogues, fanatics, and ideologues, a bit like us at this conference today.

And this is basically what Brexit was all about for millions of people.

The desire to live in a self-governing, independent nation state which controls its own borders and destiny.

The desire to live in a national community which protects its distinctive national culture, identity, values, and ways of life, not least by lowering immigration and slowing the pace of demographic change.

The desire to live in a genuine national democracy, where decisions that directly affect the people who live in that democracy are actually made in that democracy, where power is not sent upwards or sideways to distant unelected bureaucrats but is concentrated in the people, in the idea of popular sovereignty.

Unfortunately, what we’ve also learned in the eight years since the Brexit referendum, is that very few elites in British politics, especially in the incumbent ‘Conservative’ Party, really understood what Brexit was about for the masses.

Instead of giving people what they asked for, the Tories gave them the opposite.

Instead of lowering immigration, they sent it to record highs.

Instead of controlling our borders, they lost control.

Instead of handing power back to the people, they hoarded it for themselves.

Instead of taking on the radical ‘woke’ progressives who are actively working to erode our shared values, identity, and history, they complain about the so-called culture wars and view these issues, all of which are central to who we are, as being beneath them.

Instead of protecting our children from radical ideologues and belief systems that have no serious basis in science, they have presided over a massive expansion of radical gender ideology in schools, universities and the National Health Service which, as the landmark Cass Review just showed, is not based on evidence at all.

Instead of preserving our way of life the Tories became useful idiots for the radicals and extremists, mainstreaming critical race theory in our schools, universities, and the BBC, which tells the next generation they should be ashamed of who they are, because everything from the English countryside to cricket is now racist.

And the Tories, along with the political class more generally, have also failed to grasp an even deeper point about Brexit. For many of the people who voted for it, Brexit was never the end destination. It was just the end of the beginning.

Leaving the European Union, for many people, was just the first stop on a much longer journey to bringing power back to the people—to build a new politics which reflects the values and voice of ordinary people, many of whom look at our politics, institutions, and prevailing culture today and rarely see or hear anybody like them.

And already we can see what the next chapter in this story will be about.

It will not be about the European Union. It will not be about Britain’s relationship with Europe. It will be about another political project that’s now being imposed top down on the people, without their consent and support.

It will be about another project that’s being pushed on by a loose alliance of global corporations, the old parties in Westminster, the charity industrial complex, and the luxury-belief class—who advocate policies which bring them status from other elites at no cost, but which impose enormous costs on everybody else.

It will be about two words—mass immigration.

Mass immigration will be the next Brexit. Mass immigration will be the next big dividing line in British and indeed European politics more generally. And the evidence on what our elites have done to Brexit Britain is now crystal clear.

Britain is now being subjected to a political and cultural revolution that is simply without precedent in its entire history.

Between Tony Blair taking power in 1997 and today, the rate of net migration into the country—meaning the number of people coming in minus the number of people leaving—has rocketed from 50,000 to more than 700,000.

And since Brexit, it has more than doubled.

In fact, remarkably, Britain now has a higher share of people who were born abroad than America. And contrary to what the Tories promised, we’re not getting the best of the best. Far from it. Boris Johnson—who was actually never a conservative—told us we’d get a high-skill, high-wage, high-value, and highly selective immigration system which would put more into Britain’s economy than it would take out. 

But, as I’ve charted in recent months, we got the total opposite—we got a low-skill, low-wage, low-value, non-selective immigration system that’s taking more out of Britain’s economy than it’s putting in. Here’s just one statistic to consider. Of the two million or so people who have arrived and settled in Britain over the last few years guess what percentage came in on high-skill work visas? 15%. One. Five.

The Tories just hollowed out our national economy, choosing mass immigration as a quick fix without actually addressing the much deeper-rooted problems in our country. Like the fact we’ve never trained enough of our own people to work in the National Health Service. Like reforming our broken social care system. Like shutting down some of our bankrupt universities and reforming higher education.

From one issue to the next, mass immigration has been used by our elites as a temporary sticking plaster, reflecting how they’ve become drug addicts—addicted to importing cheap migrant labour because they don’t really know what else to do.

And the evidence on the effects of all this is now clear. All of the latest studies, from Denmark to the Netherlands, show the same thing. Reshaping your economy and society around lots more low-wage immigration from outside Europe makes you poorer, not richer. It just leaves you with a low-growth Uber economy.

It’s also pushing Western countries into a ‘population trap,’ whereby the sheer speed and scale of demographic change exceeds the capacity of the state to provide basic public services and public goods, from healthcare to housing.

Here’s another shocking statistic to consider.

Last year, in England and Wales, our government built 180,000 homes. It’s target is to build 300,000. But what’s even more remarkable is that we actually need to build 515,000 homes a year just to keep up with the demand from ongoing immigration.

This is completely unsustainable—you can either have available and affordable housing or you can have mass immigration. You can’t have both.

And I’m not just talking about GDP or GDP per head—which by the way is now going backwards not forwards as the advocates of mass immigration promised.

I’m talking about our shared culture, our identity, our values, our ways of life—all of the things that make us a ‘we.’ Look, for example, at how Britain will now change in the years ahead if we do not change course.

Over the next 12 years, between today and the year 2036, official government forecasts suggest another 6.5 million people will enter Britain—6.1 million because of immigration.

Immigration will now comprise 92% of all Britain’s population growth in the years ahead and completely transform the country in only a very short time. Put it this way, it took Britain half a century to go from 50 million to 60 million people. It will now take us only 20 years to go from 65 to 75 million people.

Britain, as the reliable and independent Pew Research Center notes, is now also set to experience the largest increase in the absolute number of Muslims in all of Europe—which will nearly double to around 6 million by 2030.

If Britain does not change course from its current policy of mass immigration, then, according to Pew, the share of its population that is Muslim will reach nearly 20% by the year 2050, from around 6% today.

And as the aftermath of the hideous atrocities committed against Israel on October 7th has shown, contrary to what the ruling class tell us, the blunt reality is that many British Muslims—including alarmingly large numbers of young Muslims who came of age in the 2000s and 2010s—actually reject things central to our way of life.

Only last week, for example, one survey found that 40% of British Muslims reject the suggestion Hamas murdered and raped Jews on October 7th—which increases to nearly half among young Muslims—while many openly voice antisemitic tropes.

Nearly half of British Muslims express sympathy for Hamas, more than half think it should be illegal in Britain to show a picture or cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed—like the schoolteacher in Batley did—40% would like a political party just for Muslims, and one-third want to see Sharia Law in Britain in the next twenty years.

Much of the political and media class will not address these issues because they don’t really know what to do about them. In fact, they won’t even talk about them.

This is why I think what we need to be doing, urgently, is work toward building an entirely new politics along with a new ecosystem of institutions, media, and other outlets that can better represent what most ordinary people out there think and feel.

We need to speak much more loudly and directly on behalf of the forgotten majority—on behalf of the more than 80% of all constituencies in Britain, where wanting to reduce immigration and slow the pace of change is the majority view.

We need to speak for the large majority of people who think it’s absolutely insane that we cannot deport illegal migrants and asylum seekers, including criminals, because we are still beholden to European courts and international activist lawyers.

We need to speak for the large majority of people who are tired of the political and expert class routinely subjecting them and their children to radical political and ideological experiments which often have no basis at all in evidence and science.

And we need to speak for the large majority of people who are utterly tired and fed-up of watching all the things they love—their country, their culture, their values, their history, their way life—routinely being denigrated or repudiated by elites, by the people who claim to be speaking on their behalf in the corridors of power.

Here’s the blunt reality. Neither Left nor Right will fix this mess.

Brexit, Trump, and the national populist revolt that will almost certainly erupt at the European elections this spring all show how voters are increasingly abandoning the old politics because they don’t have the answers.

The big parties are broken. They were born in a different era, built for a different time, and have shown themselves uniquely incapable of responding to the growing challenges that now confront Western democracies.

Just look at Britain. The Tories and Labour are virtually indistinguishable on many issues, clinging to the same low-growth, high-tax, big state, mass immigration, pro-woke consensus which few people out there in the country actually support.

So, the way forward for Britain, in my view at least, is not to have some decade-long civil war about the future of conservatism—the country does not have time for that.

No, the way forward is to work to build a completely new movement and ecosystem that transcends Left and Right, that rejects the big parties, that says confidently and boldly it’s time for something completely new, something that openly rejects the broken status-quo and which brings politics much closer to the people.

This is what people thought they were getting with Brexit—not just an exit from the European Union but a much more radical and sustained pushback against the political, cultural, and economic consensus that now dominates Westminster and which so few people out there, like us, are willing to challenge.

And I think we now need to give the people exactly that, so that they can push back against this political, cultural, and demographic revolution and reassert their own values and voice in a system which many of them feel, understandably, stopped listening to them a long time ago.