Review of breaking point by Matt Goodwin
I checked my email this morning to find Matt Goodwins latest piece, Breaking Point, about the catastrophe of UK immigration policy. For the last 20 years, Britain has become the immigration mecca of the western world, literally! In this piece on Goodwins Substack, you can find it at this link, Matt unpacks the devastating consequences of mass migration on the UK.
Matt Goodwin’s Breaking Point: How Mass Immigration Is Undermining Our National Community is a clarion call for a country that once believed it had a deep wellspring of unity, trust, and shared purpose. Like a true patriot with a philosopher’s touch, Goodwin manages to articulate the intangible — that mysterious, unquantifiable “we” that binds a nation together — and show us just how precariously that bond now hangs.
Goodwin’s piece begins with a beautifully simple premise: a nation is more than a GDP statistic or an abstract dot on the map. It is a living, breathing community, defined by shared identity, collective memory, and a culture built by centuries of struggle, triumph, and, above all, continuity. He rightly invokes Sir Roger Scruton, who distilled the national essence into a single, powerful idea: belonging. To belong to a nation is not merely to reside within its borders but to stand together through trials and emergencies, united by a common understanding that “we belong together.”
But what happens when the “we” begins to erode? This is where Goodwin takes his argument into darker, more unsettling territory. He describes — with the calm precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel — the systematic unraveling of that unifying fabric. Mass immigration, unmoored from the consent of the governed, acts as a solvent, dissolving the trust that underpins society. Flooding a nation with people who neither share its collective memory nor abide by its unspoken rules of cohesion is not just careless; it’s catastrophic.
And here’s where Goodwin channels something deeper, something Steyn-like in its audacity. He doesn’t tiptoe around the cultural contradictions brought by this massive influx of people from societies with radically different values. Instead, he confronts the elephant in the room with figures that would make even the most hardened optimist squirm: 86% of immigrants now come from outside Europe, often from countries whose histories, cultures, and religions are not only different from Britain’s but, in many cases, incompatible with it. This isn’t xenophobia; it’s arithmetic — the arithmetic of cohesion, trust, and the long-term viability of a shared national project.
Goodwin’s genius lies in connecting the dots between social trust and national survival. Trust is the invisible glue that holds societies together, enabling them to function even when individuals are strangers to one another. Yet how can trust thrive in a society where its newest members arrive not to assimilate but to live in parallel worlds, governed by values and norms that bear no resemblance to those of their hosts? Goodwin doesn’t mince words: it can’t.
The most damning part of Goodwin’s critique is his exposure of the sheer scale of transformation. A city the size of Birmingham added to Britain in just one year? From places with vastly lower levels of education, skills, and cultural affinity? This isn’t mere migration; it’s an upheaval. And what makes it even more galling is that it’s happening without a plan, without debate, and, most egregiously, without the consent of the British people. As Goodwin asks, where is the expert class with their grand strategies for integration and cohesion? Their silence is deafening.
If the first half of Goodwin’s essay sets the stage, the second half delivers the gut punch—a detailed, damning indictment of how mass immigration has not only stretched Britain’s resources to breaking point but fundamentally undermined the social contract that binds its people together. And he spares no one in his critique, skewering politicians from both sides of the aisle for their cowardice, duplicity, and outright contempt for the voters who trusted them.
Goodwin paints a picture of a Britain groaning under the weight of sheer numbers. With 728,000 people arriving on net in a single year—more than double the figure in the heady days of Brexit optimism—the promises of “taking back control” now look like a cruel joke. These aren’t just abstract statistics; they represent millions of new demands on an already overstretched infrastructure: housing, schools, healthcare, and basic public services. And yet, as Goodwin rightly points out, this transformation occurs against a backdrop of austerity, where winter fuel payments for pensioners are slashed while the government pours billions into housing illegal migrants in hotels with amenities that most Britons can scarcely afford.
The cumulative picture Goodwin paints is bleak. The scale of migration—4.5 million net arrivals since 2012—has added the equivalent of four Birminghams to the country in little over a decade. Yet far from strengthening the economy, these arrivals are, in large part, a drain on the public purse. Goodwin exposes the myth that this influx is driven by highly skilled workers. Instead, only 16% of migrants since 2018 came on work visas for decent-paying jobs. The rest? Students, relatives, and asylum-seekers, many of whom contribute little, if anything, to the “collective pot” while consuming an outsized share of it.
This isn’t migration as a tool for national prosperity. It’s migration as national self-sabotage. Goodwin’s breakdown of the asylum budget alone—£5.4 billion last year—makes this abundantly clear. For perspective, that’s three times the amount saved by cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners, ten times the savings from cutting council services, and over ten times the cuts inflicted on the police. It’s as if Britain’s political class has declared war on its own people, prioritizing global compassion at the expense of local survival.
What makes Goodwin’s critique so compelling—and so tragic—is how he connects these economic consequences to the deeper cultural damage. The erosion of trust. The destruction of a shared identity. The loss of the “we” that Sir Roger Scruton so eloquently described. When a nation prioritizes the needs of outsiders over its own people, the result isn’t just resentment. It’s a kind of existential hollowing-out, where the very things that once made Britain a nation—a sense of belonging, a shared purpose, a belief in mutual sacrifice—are replaced by cynicism, division, and decay.
Goodwin doesn’t just blame the migrants, though their numbers and behavior are part of the problem. He reserves his harshest criticism for the political and cultural elite, whom he accuses of imposing this radical transformation without consent or accountability. They promise one thing—“lower numbers,” “control,” “cohesion”—and deliver the opposite, all while dismissing legitimate concerns as xenophobia. It’s a betrayal so profound that, as Goodwin notes, revolutions have started over far less.
Ultimately, Breaking Point is a lament for a nation that seems determined to unmake itself. Goodwin’s warning is stark: the price of this transformation will not just be economic but civilizational. Britain is losing more than money. It’s losing the intangible things—identity, trust, culture—that make a nation worth preserving. And unless something changes, the Britain we once knew, the Britain that felt like home, will become little more than a memory.
It’s a devastating argument, delivered with the kind of clarity and urgency that’s all too rare in today’s political discourse. Whether you agree with every word or not, you can’t help but feel the weight of Goodwin’s warning. Because he’s not just asking what makes a nation. He’s asking if Britain still wants to be one. And that, in the end, is a question we can no longer afford to ignore.
Follow Matt Goodwin here https://www.mattgoodwin.org/
