Matt Goodwin’s latest column in the Mail begins, as many of these things do, with a delayed train and a £30 ticket. From there, it quickly accelerates—through FaceTime on speaker, a misinterpreted gesture on the Tube, three encounters with homeless people—to demographic apocalypse. He calls it with funereal certainty: “London is over.” What he means is: London no longer mirrors his imagination.
The tweet that sparked it all wasn’t some sociological field report. It was a routine culture war provocation disguised as concern for civic decline. In Goodwin’s hands, every inconvenience becomes an omen, every immigrant a threat, every foreign accent a sign of the city’s spiritual death. The Mail runs a piece like this every month or so, a kind of ritualised howl, just in time for breakfast. It gives readers something to splutter about over their cornflakes, proof, once again, that the country’s gone to the dogs and the capital to the foreigners.
Let’s begin with crime. Goodwin suggests London is gripped by lawlessness, with one alleged rape every hour and 70,000 phone thefts last year. But the selective horror hides the structural reality. Most categories of crime in London remain lower than a decade ago. Rises in shoplifting and phone snatching—real, worrying—track not with ethnicity or language but austerity, depleted police forces, and the collapse of prosecution rates under both Labour mayors and Tory Home Secretaries.
The spectre of the “non-English speaker” looms large in his tale, as if linguistic diversity were a public safety issue. “A cabbie told me: ‘London is dead most nights’,” he writes, as though anecdote and despair were proof. That’s the method: retail anecdote as revelation, all context stripped away. The real story, that a city hollowed out by financialisation now plays host to derelict shopping centres and Deliveroo riders working three jobs to survive, doesn’t fit his thesis.
What Goodwin mourns is not London’s material decline but the end of a particular white British hegemony. He notes, with rising alarm, that white Britons are now only a third of the capital. He names a school in Whitechapel where no child has English as their first language. He invokes the dreaded “Yookayfication”—a made-up word for the made-up fear that Britishness is dissolving in a multicultural stew.
But this isn’t cultural analysis. It’s projection. He wants a city that stops changing. That isn’t what cities do.
The truth is simpler and more boring. London has problems, it does, severe ones. A housing crisis driven by speculation. Infrastructure worn down by decades of underinvestment. Gig work. A broken model of urban development that privileges capital over community. But Goodwin has no interest in any of this. He prefers to wave charts about fertility and frame the presence of Muslims or Africans as civilisational threat.
Immigration, he concedes, is not the fault of migrants themselves. Then he blames them anyway. Low-wage workers, he argues, are “taking more from the economy than they put in” as if the British bosses paying poverty wages and the government slashing public services were innocent bystanders.
He even gets nostalgic for the London cabbie with “deep and historic knowledge,” now allegedly replaced by an Uber driver from Somalia who uses Google Maps. But the point here is not transport. It’s identity. Knowledge of the A–Z is treated as a proxy for knowing one’s place.
The real fear animating Goodwin’s piece is not that London is unsafe, or unaffordable, or changing. It’s that it no longer belongs to people like him.
It’s telling that nowhere in this lament is there any mention of who actually broke London. The city that Goodwin now calls “over” was gutted not by migrants or moped thieves, but by the same neoliberal project he has cheerfully supported for most of his career. When he cites 30,000 millionaires leaving London, he offers it as evidence of decline—not a glimmer of hope that the city might, one day, belong to its workers again.
As for the proliferation of Palestinian flags? That’s not foreignness. That’s solidarity.
London isn’t over. It’s fighting for itself. The tragedy is not that Matt Goodwin no longer recognises it. The tragedy is that his politics helped to make it harder for anyone else to live in it.
