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.
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.
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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