Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, has cultivated a public image as a populist voice for ordinary Britons, railing against what he describes as a "new ruling class" of cultural progressives. But a closer look at his career and affiliations reveals a far more complex—and controversial—story, one that stretches from the boardrooms of global finance to academic networks with links to discredited race science and eugenics.
Goodwin’s rise to political prominence has been accompanied by a lucrative parallel career advising some of the world’s largest financial institutions. According to Byline Times, his speaking agency, the Blair Partnership, boasts that he has worked with "hundreds of companies." His personal website and agency profile confirm paid engagements with financial giants including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Rothschild & Cie, Schroders, and even Google. Law firms like Clifford Chance and White & Case also appear on his client list.
In 2024 alone, Goodwin spoke at the Schroders Manchester Investment Conference and delivered a keynote at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh for the same firm—Schroders, which manages around £823 billion in assets. He also gave a keynote on geopolitical trends at the 22nd CFO Forum in Greece, hosted by KPMG, and appeared in a webinar for Utmost Wealth Solutions discussing the future of politics and its impact on wealth planning. He addressed business heads from firms managing between £100 million and £800 million in assets at an Owen James event in mid-2025 and gave a comprehensive overview of key political trends ahead of the 2024 UK general election at an Owen James Meeting of Minds event in London.
His speaking engagements extend to infrastructure investors, asset managers, and the launch of the Nedgroup Investments Global Strategic Bond fund aboard HMS Belfast. In early 2026, just weeks before Reform UK announced his candidacy, Goodwin was in St Moritz, Switzerland, giving the keynote at the GRI Institute Chairman’s Retreat—a gathering for "global real estate decision-makers at the top of the deal-making chain." As he posted on LinkedIn, he "very much enjoyed giving a talk on the demographic and cultural challenges facing the West at the GRI Institute Chairman’s Retreat in Switzerland this week for top investors from around the world."
These engagements are not minor affairs. Industry standards for keynote speakers at major financial conferences typically range from £10,000 to £25,000 per event. Goodwin’s agency lists him as having worked with "hundreds of companies," suggesting a substantial income from these appearances.
Yet, Goodwin’s public persona is built on a narrative of standing up to out-of-touch elites. In his 2023 book Values, Voice and Virtue, he argued that a university-educated liberal elite dominates British political life, marginalizing ordinary people. He has defined national populism, alongside Professor Roger Eatwell, as a movement that "prioritises the culture and interests of the nation and promises to give voice to a people who feel they have been held in contempt by distant and often corrupt elites." But as Byline Times points out, the "elite" Goodwin targets—cultural progressives in universities, the civil service, and the media—does not include the investment bankers, asset managers, and global real estate executives who pay for his analysis.
Goodwin’s connections to elite financial circles stand in sharp contrast to his campaign rhetoric, which has sometimes targeted some of Britain’s most marginalized communities. He has questioned the "Britishness" and "Englishness" of UK-born ethnic minority people, stating in November 2025 that "it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody 'British'." In June 2025, he described "Englishness" as "an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations," a formulation that excludes millions of British citizens.
His policy proposals have also drawn attention. Goodwin has advocated for a "negative child benefit tax" for those without children and called for removing income tax for women with two or more children, arguing that universities are dominated by "childless women," which he claims contributes to "politically correct authoritarianism." Over the past decade, Goodwin has shifted from a liberal critic of the far right to a self-styled "anti-woke" nationalist populist.
But it is his academic associations that have sparked the most controversy. Since early 2025, Goodwin has held a visiting professorship at the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS), directed by his long-time collaborator Professor Eric Kaufmann. The CHSS network, as detailed by Byline Times, includes organizations with documented ties to discredited racist pseudoscience and a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation, the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), successor to the infamous Pioneer Fund established in 1937.
The Pioneer Fund was notorious for distributing Nazi propaganda and funding research purporting to establish biological hierarchies between racial groups—claims thoroughly debunked by mainstream genetic science. Neither the Pioneer Fund nor its successor, the HDF, has ever renounced these origins. Among the CHSS’s "mission-aligned" organizations is Aporia Magazine, exposed by Hope Not Hate and The Guardian as the publishing arm of the HDF. Goodwin appeared as a guest on the Aporia podcast in 2023, discussing immigration attitudes in Britain without challenging the program’s premises.
Goodwin has also defended controversial figures associated with race science. In 2019, he criticized Cambridge University’s dismissal of Noah Carl—whose work was condemned by over 500 academics as "ethically suspect and methodologically flawed" racist pseudoscience—as "mob rule… crushing free speech on campus." Carl, who published in the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly and attended secretive eugenics conferences, later became a senior editor at Aporia Magazine.
Goodwin’s collaborator Kaufmann has explicitly defended gene-oriented race-IQ research, despite overwhelming scientific consensus against it. A 2023 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences refuted the notion of biological races and the race-IQ thesis, stating that genetic data "refute the notion of racial substructure for human populations."
Goodwin has promoted Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, in multiple public writings since 2019. The Bell Curve claims, using research funded by the Pioneer Fund, that black people are less intelligent than white people for genetic reasons—a view widely condemned as racist pseudoscience. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has designated Murray a "white nationalist" who uses "racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor."
When asked about these affiliations, a spokesperson from the University of Buckingham said, "The University of Buckingham strongly supports free speech and academic freedom. Views expressed by our academics, honorary fellows and other individuals or organisations affiliated with the University, our research centres or our staff are their own, and do not represent the views of the University." Professor Kaufmann, for his part, stated, "I am not interested in race and intelligence, as you can see from our research. I list Aporia because they regularly summarise heterodox social science articles of interest, not because of their race and intelligence research."
Reform UK’s own leadership is not without ties to the world of finance and real estate. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, is a former commodities trader; chairman Richard Tice is a multi-millionaire property developer; and treasurer Nick Candy is a billionaire luxury real estate developer. While Farage has at times criticized the influence of global capital—tweeting in November 2024 that "big business and big government work together"—Reform UK itself is structured as a limited company rather than a traditional membership party.
When confronted with questions about Goodwin’s corporate and academic affiliations, a Reform UK spokesman responded, "For the last twenty years through his award winning research and his best selling works, Matt has given talks around the world to government, corporations and other prestigious organisations. He uses these talks to explain to elites just out of touch they are and why they are so disconnected from the wants and needs of hard-working people." Another party spokesperson dismissed criticism as "desperate bordering on conspiratorial by a discredited outlet attempting to derail a democratic election," emphasizing Goodwin’s international academic and professional experience.
As Goodwin campaigns for votes in one of Manchester’s most deprived constituencies, the dissonance between his anti-elite rhetoric and his record of serving—and being handsomely compensated by—the global elite, as well as his troubling academic associations, has become impossible to ignore. For many observers, the question remains: whose interests does Goodwin’s brand of populism truly serve?
With the by-election looming, voters in Gorton and Denton face a stark choice—one that will test not only the appeal of populist rhetoric, but also the public’s appetite for accountability and transparency in those who seek to represent them.