Reform’s Gorton candidate Goodwin linked to Nazi pseudoscience

Parachuted-in Reform UK by-election candidate Matthew Goodwin’s links to Nazi pseudoscience have been exposed in coverage by Byline Times. The revelation comes hot on the heels of allegations of sexual harassment and reports that Reform boss Nigel Farage is scrambling to distance himself from Goodwin’s record of misogyny.

Goodwin: if it walks like a duck

Goodwin represents Reform this week in the Gorton and Denton by-election created by the ‘retirement’ of its former Labour incumbent. He holds a ‘visiting professorship’ at an academic centre connected to “the front publication for a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation”.

Eugenics is a notorious, racist pseudoscience that began in Victorian Britain but was taken up by the Nazis as a way of ‘Aryanising’ the population to remove supposed ‘unworthy’ characteristics. It has never truly fallen out of favour with the far right – and Goodwin has:

actively defended, promoted and cited key figures within the network

of at least five organisations linked to the eugenics movement, including ‘Aporia’. Aporia was exposed in 2024 as the publishing arm of the US far-right, so-called ‘Human Diversity Foundation’, described as a reconstitution of the Nazi ‘Pioneer Foundation’ (PF). Neither organisation has ever renounced their racist origins.

Goodwin holds the ‘visiting professor’ post at the University of Buckingham’s ‘Centre for Heterodox Social Science’ (CHSS). CHSS lists the racist organisations in a section titled “Our Network” and says that all of them are “mission-aligned” with its goals.

As Byline Times notes:

Goodwin has argued that people from Black, Asian and other immigrant backgrounds are not necessarily British. “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he said in November 2025.

In an interview in June 2025, he described “Englishness” as “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations.” The formulation excludes millions of British citizens. He has claimed that women in Britain are having children “much too late” and called for a “negative child benefit tax” for those without children, alongside removing income tax for women with two or more.

Goodwin has also complained that universities are too dominated by “childless women”, which he claimed leads to “politically correct authoritarianism.”

Once a critic of the far right and its abusiveness, Goodwin jumped the fence to join the extremists. Bookies and many polling companies make local plumber and Green candidate Hannah Spencer favourite to win on Thursday, but the Green ‘get out the vote’ operation will be crucial.

Direct form, not just links

Goodwin’s links to so-called ‘race science’ are not just indirect links. In 2019, pseudoscientist Noah Carl was dismissed from a Cambridge University research post after fellow academics signed a letter describing his work as “ethically suspect and… flawed” racism dressed as science. Carl had published his work in another Nazi-funded, white supremacist magazine and the university’s own investigation came to the same conclusion about his claims.

But Goodwin went to bat for the discredited Carl, describing the university’s decision as “mob rule crushing free speech on campus”. The disgraced Carl moved on to become a regular writer for the above-mentioned Aporia, eventually becoming senior editor in 2022. Goodwin then appeared on the magazine’s supremacist podcast – but not to challenge its positions.

Goodwin has quoted white nationalist icon Charles Murray – who attributed inequality to the supposed inferiority of racialised groups and of women – at least three times. Murray claimed that good breeding made the wealthy superior to the inferior genes of those less privileged.

Goodwin has also claimed that science is about to endorse these supposed racial differences that underpin eugenics:

the idea that there are not inherent differences between groups is just going to be completely unsustainable. I mean it already is if you look at the evidence. Over the next 5-10 years it’s just going to look utterly ridiculous as a lot of this research and evidence comes through.

Goodwin did not respond to the publication’s request for comment. Reform – as with the sexual harassment allegations, dismissed them as:

desperate [allegations] bordering on conspiratorial by a discredited outlet attempting to derail a democratic election.

The blighted condition of British politics under Starmer and the fascist Tory/Reform axis he tries to emulate has become so awful that it is a high bar to say that a particular right-winger is unfit to be anywhere near a parliamentary seat. But that proposition applies to Goodwin.

Featured image via the Canary