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Several things are risible about the Matt Goodwin column.
1. the idea that you generate free speech by dictating speaking policies to universities.
2. the conflation of free speech with right to outlets and platforms.
3. the dissembling that he is interested in free speech. Obvs it is not about free speech. It's about his kind of speech. National populist speech.
4. setting himself up as a victim, with unspecified, unverifiable claims of offence. Using himself as an example of the cancelled, after countless TV appearences, his column, his twitter following, his book deal, his nice Legatum job. How uncancelled can you get?
5. avoiding the real reason he meets challenge on here, which is that his work is so shoddy, so regularly misuses data and methods to the point IMO of busing the label 'academic'.
6. like many of his interventions, this one seems not to be about the presented claims, but is just about trying to generate more attention, a private sector stoking of the government culture war, whose battles place him as a protagonist, to reap the £ that follows from it.
7. hypocritical. he blocks many [me included] + the subsequent arguments about it reveal how he has tried to threaten others for writing things about him. blocking is fine - I do it - it's personal deplatforming of the blocked. but you don't get to whinge about cancellation.
8. the practice of covering one's tracks. deleting tweets that trump's loss made look not so prescient. fibbing about what he has forecast well. what a fool - why would anyone really care about being able to forecast Brexit?
9. And yes, championing small-minded nativism from behind the 'I voted Remain but' label is on the list too.
There is a threat to university education and the contribution academe can make to public life. But it is not what Matt is worrying about.
It's that people might get taken in by his op eds that confuse the normative with the positive, that by constant reference to his Professorship it's mistakenly assumed he is engaging in analysis when he is doing persuasion.
Another aspect that bothers me is how he potrays his antagonists. There are often attempts to portray them as engaging in harrassment or obsession. An insinuation that they are the ones with motivations other than reasoning, a rather clever and dark inversion of the facts.
