MattGPT: Has Goodwin used AI to write his new book?

Matt Goodwin, the one-time academic turned hard right rabble-rouser, has a new book out. But should he be sharing the authorship on the cover of the apocalyptic Suicide of a Nation with one Mr ChatGPT?

Social media users have taken one for the team and ploughed through the Reform man’s pompous prose and found much to suggest a reliance on AI. Citations are lacking, elementary facts are incorrect and quotes appear to have no basis in reality – a classic sign of AI hallucination. What’s more, on those occasions where the GB News host has bothered to list a citation, he has sometimes left ChatGPT in the URL, making it clear where his research had come from.

Suicide of a Nation, published by the previously unknown Northstar, is described as “a story of how Britain, one of the most remarkable countries on earth, is not just in decline but is committing national suicide”. It is also said to draw on “a huge amount of data, rigorous analysis and demographic forecasts”.

But writer Andy Twelves took to social media after making it through just five chapters of Goodwin’s screed and finding numerous claims which bore little scrutiny and carried no citation. These included that only four of 28 pupils spoke English as their first language in a single year one classroom in Bradford, that most primary school pupils’ main language in Leicester, Luton, Slough and “virtually all of London” is no longer English and that Cicero warned “We must begin with the people closest to us” (there is no record of Cicero ever saying this).

There are also other apparently hallucinated quotes from the academics James Burnham and Walker Connor and the philosophers Friedrich Hayek and Roger Scruton, a quote attributed to Boris Johnson when “in opposition in 2019” (the Conservatives were in power from 2010 to 2024) and apparently invented visa figures, among much else.

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In addition, another writer, John Merrick, looked at the few citations Goodwin – who failed to win the Gorton and Denton by-election for Reform last month – had put in the book, and found that on some occasions he had not even remembered or bothered to remove ChatGPT from the URLs, making his source clear.

Goodwin has since responded to the criticism in an angry post on, inevitably, X – one in which he fails to address a single one of the claims about his sloppy book and instead insults his critics. “The Left are having a meltdown about Suicide of a Nation – cherry-picking, misrepresenting, and hate-bombing the Amazon reviews. Why?” Is it because it’s full of errors, Matt? Oh, no. “Because they think they own and control the public debate.”

“Their default mode whenever a book/thinker comes along that dismantles their worldview is to try & discredit it and attack the person, not the argument,” he goes on, completely missing the fact that his critics had indeed gone through the book and highlighted numerous mistakes.

“Every single person who knows the data knows that everything in this book is correct – even if they would rather you not know about it, or talk about it,” he says. “The Left don’t want you to read it, they don’t want you to know what is in this book, because they do not want you to know what is happening around you. They do not want you to know the truth.”

Perhaps the last word should be left to someone unfortunate enough to have been taught by Goodwin in his time in academia – Sam Blacklaws, a parliamentary caseworker in the House of Commons who studied politics at the University of Kent when Goodwin was lecturing there.

“Hi Matt, I can’t really remember your teaching, but you were one of my lecturers at Kent Uni,” he wrote on X. “Just a quick question – if I had submitted work with just one citation per 17 pages, several of which were from ChatGPT, would you have thought that was good enough to publish?”. Goodwin, alas, has yet to respond.