Bartholomew's Notes

Last August, I noticed how Reform ideologue Matt Goodwin has a tendency to present banal but arguable maxims as quotes attributed by him to scholars and Classical figures ranging from Pericles and Cicero to the late Sir Robert Scruton, but that verifying his sources online always proves impossible (1). I can’t claim anyone much noticed, although a journalist named Jake Pace Lowrie suggested to me that Goodwin had perhaps produced “a Chatgpt hallucination of a Scruton quote”.

The issue of Goodwin’s quotes has now come to the fore with the publication of his book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, due to a close reading by a writer named Andy Twelves. In a viral social media thread, Twelves claimed to have found “a huge amount of what appears to be false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data, that appear to be AI hallucinations” in the first five chapters, which he then proceeded to lay out. Another poster, John Merrick, then provided the extra detail that Goodwin’s minimal footnoting includes urls that contain referers from ChatGPT (inspiring the nickname “MattGPT”). Although Twelves’ sympathies are to the left he was invited to expand on his theme in The Spectator, and he was acknowledged in a scathing review of the book by Ben Sixsmith published in The Critic. Merrick, meanwhile, provided a piece for the New Statesman. Twelves also published an article in The Nerve.

In response, Goodwin now argues that the “focus on disputed quotations” shows that critics are unable to assail his argument, although the two are intertwined and in fact both aspects of his work have come under scrutiny. He has also posted a longer “response to my critics”, in which he simply reiterates the book’s main points and explains that the book was not published through a mainstream publisher because “I believe the publishers have been ideologically captured and no longer allow genuine free speech and debate” – which is hard to credit given that the likes of Douglas Murray and Liz Truss enjoy mainstream book deals. At Unherd, meanwhile, Mary Harrington has written a – hopefully ironic – “qualified defence”, arguing that in today’s world

legacy book-type concerns such as exact quotation or factual precision are secondary to more net-native attributes, such as emotional intensity and a sense of epistemic validation… In… older terms, conventional within mainstream print publishing, citing AI-generated fake “quotes” is obviously inexcusable. But there exists a large and avid audience for whom accuracy is by the by — and that can, on occasion, tempt academics into more heated and sometimes dubiously fact-checked territory.

That audience, of course, ought to include senior figures in Reform UK – Nigel Farage and Richard Tice have an opportunistic attitude when it comes to amplifying false claims that serve their purposes (e.g. here). Yet Reform has done nothing to promote the book, despite Goodwin having recently stood as the Reform candidate in a high-profile by-election in Gorton and Denton. This gives the impression that Reform UK does not regard the work – and perhaps even the failed candidate himself – as even useful. Indeed, Tim Montgomerie, who recently defected to Reform, appears to regard him as a liability, going so far as to suggest that the party “should now fully investigate Mr Goodwin’s book and if there are repeated examples of factual error he should be removed from the candidates list”.

Goodwin replied to Montgomerie with “All you do is criticise Reform & our campaigns. I have no idea why you are even in Reform unless it is to try and weaken it?”. Perhaps Farage would shrug off the spat as “one of those things that happens between men”, although if asked to adjudicate Montgomerie is well-connected via other high-profile Conservative Party defectors in Reform.

UPDATE: Goodwin and Twelves have now debated the book on GB News – Goodwin has his own show on the channel, but this was a standalone clash hosted by Miriam Cates. We cannot know how popular Goodwin is among his colleagues, but follow-up commentary on the channel by “The Saturday Five” mocked his “Triggered Tantrum of the week”. Goodwin has also responded with an article in the Daily Mail, in which he attempted to downplay his fabricated quotations by focusing on one example from Cicero and claiming that this shows “my critics would rather nit-pick over interpretations of Latin nit-pick over interpretations of Latin than deal with the evidence-based arguments I put forward”.

On social media, meanwhike, Goodwin has attempted to compensate for the humiliation and to resassure everyone that he is not in fact having a meltdown by making some crowing posts: “I’d like to take this moment to thank all the Lefties & Losers for helping make Suicide of a Nation the 2nd biggest book in Britain”, he writes, adding that he is “Drinking ‘Remainer Tears'”. This argument that strong sales are an answer to criticism is based on an Amazon ranking.

Note

1. Much print literature can now be searched even if not directly accessed via Google Books and the Internet Archive, while Google Scholar and websites that allow reseachers to upload academic papers provide innumerable secondary sources where quotes may often be found. The content of many indivdivual books can also be searched on Amazon.

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From the Guardian:

[Nigel Farage] described as “a wake up call and a warning to everybody” an event in Trafalgar Square earlier this week where hundreds of Muslims and people of other faiths prayed together, before the celebration of Eid.

He said the event, organised by the Ramadan Tent Project and attended by Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, was “an open, deliberate, wilful attempt, not at the private observance of a different religion, but the attempt to overtake, intimidate and dominate our way of life”.

The event has happened in the historic square in central London five times before without incident or previous controversy.

Farage has posted a clip of his speech online – he described participants as “a group of people headed up by the ghastly Sadiq Khan”,  and denounced the previous Conservative government for having “let most of these people in”, ending with the promise that “we will not put up with this any more”. This was not, then, criticism of Islamic extremism or even of Islam: his target was Muslims as people, seen collectively as recent and unwelcome arrivals in the UK who therefore have less right to a public space that has historically been a focus for all sorts of cultural, political and religious events (such as a 2021 conspiracy theory rally).

It seems likely that Farage, as usual, was inspired by simple opportunism – his talking points were cribbed from a social media post made a couple of days beforehand by Nick Timothy, the Conservative Party shadow justice secretary. In  Timothy’s view:

mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination.

The adhan – which declares there is no god but allah and Muhammad is his messenger – is, when called in a public place, a declaration of domination.

…I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook.

In other words, we don’t need to ask people why they participated – we know it was an “act of domination” (rather than, say, an expression of community spirit or religious witness) whether or not participants would recognise such a framing. There was no prima facie evidence of religious extremism, but ordinary Muslims who attended were being manipulated by “the Islamist playbook”, meaning that in terms of their presence in public spaces there is no real difference between a liturgical and traditional expression of faith and belligerent extremists waving obnoxious banners around. Timothy strikes the pose of a typical moral entrepreneur, identifying urgent social problem that most people appear to have overlooked for several years.

Timothy was countered by Dominic Grieve:

I agree that mass prayer in public by large groups without prior permission, that aims to disrupt the activities of others, can be an act of ‘domination’ just as a sit down on Westminster Bridge or the M25 can be or any other illegal demonstration or one accompanied by threats or harassment.

This did not apply to this gathering in Trafalgar Square. It was done with permission. It comprised short prayers followed by an Iftar to break the Ramadan fast. It threatened no one any more than the Palm Sunday procession (with permission) in which I shall participate shortly where I live and where there will be hymns to the effect that Jesus Christ is Lord. Your original post says that this event ‘should not happen again’. You are the Shadow Justice Secretary, perhaps one day the person who will take an oath to uphold the rule of law. As I put to you in my last post [here], stopping such an event would be unlawful and discriminatory unless you intend to advocate changing the law to discriminate against Muslims. Is that what you are saying? So far you have not attempted to answer this question.

A couple of recent examples of religious “domination” from central London come to mind: the Christian Right “King’s Army” march through Soho last October, and the month before that Brian Tamaki’s participation in Tommy Robinson’s misdescribed “free speech” rally, in which the New Zealand fundamentalist called for outright bans on non-Christian religious expression.

UPDATE (22 March): Reform figures have continued to milk the supposed controversy, their views of course amplified by GB News. One GB News social media post tells us that according to Matt Goodwin, the Trafalgar Square event was “‘an attempt to undermine our Christian culture and values” – a clip from his show on the channel shows him quoting Jonathan Sacerdoti on the subject of a “1991 memorandum” by the Muslim Brotherhood, which Goodwin pelieces has explanatory value. Another GB News post then clips Robert Jenrick on their channel calling it “essentially an anti-British event”.

Meanwhile, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has tried different approach. After being goaded by Keir Starmer she has given her backing to Timothy, but she has tried to shift the discussion towards the issue of gender segregation.

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Snopes discusses claims that the destruction of a girl’s school in Minab in Iran resulting in great loss of life was due to a misfired Iranian missle rather than the US-Israel bombardment, and that Iran had supposedly admitted as much (urls in original):

Did Iranian authorities claim responsibility?

In short, no. Iranian authorities have not issued any official statements taking responsibility for the attack on the girls’ school. Numerous posts spread the claim on X (archived here, here, and here) and shared the same screenshot of a Telegram account that reportedly shared an IRGC statement written in Farsi.

Difficulties with the claim ought to have been obvious from the start. The school is close to an IRGC compound that was likely to have been the intended target, and even if Iran had done it, it seems unlikely that an autocratic regime would admit to it. And why would the story not have made its way into mainstream media in Israel at the very least? (1)

The second of the three links noted by Snopes belongs to none other than Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform UK. And he he did not just “spread” the claim – he presented it accusingly as proof that the mainstream media and Zack Polanski (leader of the Green Party) were “spreading fake news” about the attack. (2)

This is part of a pattern in which Tice and Reform leader Nigel Farage express absolute confidence that they have penetrated the truth of some matter of public concern, based on dubious evidence that they have no inclination to look into before mouthing off. Some instances are relatively trivial, but the ideologically driven misattribution of a mass child casualty event during military conflict ought to raise serious alarm bells as to how easy it would be for bad actors to manipulate UK policy under a Reform government.

Some previous examples

Last summer, Farage was confident that he had “proof” that Essex Police had transported counter-prostestors to the site of anti-asylum seeker protests in Essex – in fact, the video he relied showed counter-protestors being taken away from the area; and before that, he and Tice both misinterpreted screenshots from IMdB to make wild accusations that a racist Reform activist had been a paid actor sent in by Channel 4 News (3). And most notoriously, of course, Farage gave spurious credibility to a false rumour about the identity of the Southport attacker, although in that instance he was more careful to couch his words in vague generalities.

Tice also appears to believe that what an unnamed “cancer expert” reportedly told Piers Morgan over lunch proves that mass Covid vaccination was disastrous (4); that the juxtaposition of two weather maps suggests that “we are being played” by meteorologists; and the fact that a scraper website in Pakistan helped to spread pre-existing fake news about the Southport attacker means that the whole matter can be laid at the door of “a gentleman in Pakistan”.

Notes

1. Further detail in the Guardian:

Shortly after the attack, misinformation began to proliferate online. Some social media accounts claimed the footage of the school was old footage shot in Pakistan, a claim that has been debunked. Several X accounts also made viral claims that the school had been struck by a misfired IRGC missile, but the photographs of the misfire that they present as evidence were taken about 1,600km (994 miles) away from Minab, in the city of Zanjan.

2. Although not mentioned by Snopes, the same line was taken by the Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson, who asked why BBC News had not retracted its reporting. The BBC had in fact quite properly reported on the matter as “Iran has blamed the US and Israel”, flagging up a lack of independent verification.

3. After the evidence collapsed under scrutiny, was announced via Paul Staines that an unnamed “senior barrister” was investigating the claim on behalf of a group called “Ofcom Watch”. It is reasonable to suspect here a contrivance by which Reform UK could “move on” while not appearing to back down.

4. Almost certainly this was Angus Dalgleish.

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