Let’s get this out of the way early: Matt Goodwin’s new self-published book, Suicide of a Nation, is bad. Very bad. In fact, even for the increasingly gimcrack world of the British right, it is a shockingly poor piece of research and writing, made worse by the fact that Goodwin was until recently a fairly well-respected academic.
As the writer Andy Twelves and others have catalogued, the book is filled with falsely attributed quotes (all of which, oddly enough, have the same flattened style as Goodwin himself), misinterpreted data, and dubious, out of context or just plain made-up statistics. Of the only 12 footnotes in the book – the vast majority of which are in the first chapter, as if he gave up with references after the first few pages – two contain links that still have their ChatGPT source code embedded in them. Of the rest, five are to Goodwin’s own blog, while another is to a Telegraph article about something Goodwin himself wrote.
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