In the aftermath of riots in the U.K., fueled by misinformation about migrants and Muslims, the debate about racism and integration has once again taken centre stage.

My guest tonight suggests the riots were the result of legitimate anger over too many migrants.

His critics say that the author and academic who built his career on explaining the rise of the radical right has now been radicalized by it himself.

I'm Mehdi Hassan, and I'll be going head-to-head with the provocative British political commentator

Matthew Goodwin.

I'll challenge him on his views on immigration and why he thinks that a new woke elite is silencing free speech.

I'll also be joined by a panel of experts.

Zoe Gardner, immigration policy expert and campaigner for migrant rights.

Taj Ali, journalist and historian of British South Asian political activism.

And David Goodhart, immigration expert and author.

Matthew Goodwin, thank you for joining me on Head to Head tonight.

You and I have known each other indirectly, online, through conversations, about over a decade now.

But your views are very different, I would argue, to what they were when I knew you back in the U.K. here in 2011, 2012, 2013, when many would say you were a champion of diversity, multiculturalism, immigrants, Muslims.

You were calling out the far right.

Your critics now say, Matt, that you have become, quote, a part of the right populist movement you once sought to explain, that you've gone native with them, that, quote, instead of writing about the radical right, you've become part of it.

So let me start tonight by asking, what happened to you?

Well, as somebody once said, when the facts change, I change my opinion.

And over the last 15 years, I've become convinced that mass immigration is a failure, one of the biggest disasters in recent public policy.

I think the elites in Western countries have fundamentally lost touch with the voters in those countries.

And I think that unless we change course quickly, we're going to have some really big problems.

A lot of people sympathize with that view, of course, although over the summer, we saw a very extreme violent opposition to immigrants, immigration.

The U.K. saw horrific race riots sparked by the murder of three young girls in the town of Southport.

We saw mosques and asylum hotels attacked, police officers attacked, over a thousand people arrested.

In a post for your Substack, you called the people at those riots, quote, ordinary people who feel like they're losing their country and trying to, quote, exercise their voice.

It sounded to a lot of your critics that you were justifying those riots, these horrific racist riots.

We just had an election in this country in July.

That's how you exercise your voice in a democracy, not via rioting when you don't get your way at the ballot box.

Well, protest has always been part of our political DNA.

And obviously, everybody would disassociate themselves from the criminality and the violence in the summer.

I certainly wrote about it.

I condemned it.

But as Mark Easton and other liberal commentators at the time noted, there were also ordinary people protesting about what has been happening to their country.

And that isn't just about mass migration.

It's also about the breakdown of borders.

It's about feeling unsafe in their own community, in their own country.

And for people who engage in violence, they should have been rounded up and sent to prison, as many of them were.

But there were lots of peaceful protesters at those events as well.

And the polling afterwards, Mehdi, you know, was quite revealing.

Over 60 percent of Brits said, yes, I blame the people who engage in violence.

But actually, 63 percent said, I blame recent government immigration policy for these protests.

And what I was trying to do in that piece is to say, look, there is clearly a lot more going on here than these idiots and morons who are trying to set fire to a hotel or attack a mosque.

What we have in this country is a social fabric that is breaking down, and we need to talk about it.

It was mixed polling.

I mean, YouGov also found that the protests, even the protests were only supported by one in three Britons, 34 percent.

In fact, only one in six said that people causing unrest had legitimate concerns.

It's interesting that you say you condemn the violence, but in your big substat post on the riots, you only condemned the violence against the police.

You did not condemn the violence against Muslims, Asians, the attack on a mosque in Southport.

There was not one word from you about that, and you wrote a 2,000-word piece.

Well, I'm sure I did at the time, and I condemn it now.

I think nobody in their right mind would say that was somehow excusable.

But clearly, what was going on there was a bit like during the BLM protests in 2020.

We had a national conversation about the legitimate injustices that underpinned those protests.

It did result in the injury of 30 police officers and lots of unrest in America, as you know better than me.

Cities like Portland were largely devastated by protests and anarchism.

But yet we still had this mature conversation about what is going on here.

Just to be clear, the Black Lives Matter protests were not like this.

Ninety percent of the protests in the U.S., according to one academic study, showed they were peaceful.

There was no comparison.

Preeti Patel, not known as a kind of liberal, muesli-eating, sandal-wearing leftist, hardcore right-wing Home Secretary under the Conservatives, said there's a clear difference between that and then.

She says what we saw during the pandemic protests, the BLM protests, was protest.

This is a complete distinction.

This is burning down of places of worship, thuggery, violence, racism.

OK, but the issue is, for lots of people, what these events became was a proxy for this underlying issue that we've never in this country been able to get on top of, which is we promise the British people one thing, which is control and lower migration, and then we do another.

Preeti Patel is an interesting example.

You say she's hard right.

I'd say she's the most pro-immigration Home Secretary we've ever had in this country.

Now, if you're a Conservative voter in Northern England, you were promised in 2019 lower migration, lower oval numbers and a high-skill policy.

And then the government that you elected gives you the absolute opposite of that, puts everything on steroids and says to hell with you, you're going to be frustrated and you're going to be angry.

I just want to deal with these riots issues because you say you condemn it now, you didn't condemn it in your post.

You even wrote sympathetically, Matt, about a woman who went to prison in the UK because according to you, quote, she wrote something very offensive on Facebook and you objected to that.

Can you tell us what she said?

Yeah, she was a full-time carer for her husband and she wrote something along the lines of they should blow up this mosque.

And I think she said something hideous.

Blow the mosque up with the adults in it?

You don't think that merits a prison sentence?

If somebody writes something on social media in their own home, however offensive I might find it, I don't think they should go to prison.

That's my personal opinion.

You don't think people can incite violence on social media?

It doesn't matter whether she's in her home.

If it's clear incitement, they should be in prison.

Blow the mosque up with adults in it?

She also very quickly deleted it.

She expressed sorrow.

I believe in Christian notions of forgiveness.

If somebody says I'm sorry, I say give you a second chance.

How many Muslims have gone to prison over the last 20 years for saying much less than that on social media?

Well, I can disagree with that.

It's the same principle as non-crime hate incidents.

I think what we're living through is an Orwellian imposition from above that I think lots of people in this country, the home of individual liberty, common law, Magna Carta, repel against.

I'm one of them.

I don't think we should be doing that.

Here's what really bothered a lot of people about your post and actually really undermines,

I would argue, one of the key arguments you make in your book.

You say we should treat people as individuals.

Don't become obsessed with group identities, ethnic identities, racial identities.

And yet you wrote about the guy accused of murdering these three little girls, that he was the son of immigrants from Rwanda.

Why is it relevant that the suspect is the British son of Rwandan immigrants?

He ultimately was a product of migration.

He was a second generation migrant.

We know from a lot of research that cultural practices, traditions, values, different ways of life tend to pass down from first to second, third generation.

We know he came from a very conflict-ridden society, Rwanda.

We have no idea what his motivation is.

The police don't know.

What do you know that they know?

Well, one of those potential motivations, let's see what happens.

But why didn't you wait to see what happens before you made a kind of slur against Rwandan immigrants?

Because the fact is, this ultimately was a symbol, I think.

How is it a symbol?

It's got nothing to do with his parents.

Unless you have some evidence that the police don't have.

As I said in the original piece, for many Brits, what happened in the 12 days of that hot summer, we saw young British Muslim lads assaulting police officers in Manchester airport.

We saw a young second generation lad stabbing a British army officer almost to death.

What's that got to do with your description of the attack?

Just hear me out.

In the course of a week, we saw the South End machete gangs, mass violence.

We had the riots in Leeds.

We had evidence of communalism in other parts of the country.

We had sectarianism at the general election just a month before.

In your opinion?

Is it not a fact?

This is your opinion?

I think for lots of Brits, when you put that together and you look at the course of those things, I think what 2024 will come back to be seen as was really a watershed moment in our debate over...

I understand, but you're avoiding the question, Matt.

You are!

I'm coming to the central point, which is...

Please, deal with the child of Rwandan immigrants.

I want to nail this down.

Is Britain an integrated society, and do the people who are coming into Britain...

What evidence do you have?

You seem to be implying all sorts of things.

We know nothing about...

Well, I think going out and doing a mass stabbing and going on a murder rampage...

A mass stabbing is very British.

Sorry to break it to you.

A lot of British people do stabbings and killings.

This kid was a Brit.

Is a Brit.

Or is he not a Brit to you?

It depends how you define national identity.

Wow.

So am I not a Brit?

No, I think it's do you respect the country that you live in, and do you follow the rule of law?

So it's a conditional citizenship?

It's not conditional.

You just said it depends on whether you respect the country you live in.

For somebody who doesn't want to judge people on group identities, why are you bringing up the parents of this kid?

Do you have any evidence?

We have lots of evidence.

You do?

Well, science has lots of evidence that the second, third generation migrants bring over certain cultural habits, traits, practices.

Murder?

No, but for example, second generation British Muslims, for example, will express higher levels of religiosity.

He was a Muslim.

That's part of the problem.

No, but the underlying point...

No, because you're dodging the point here.

This guy was the son of Rwandan immigrants, and you cannot explain to this audience why you thought it was relevant to bring that up.

I've just explained.

Because Muslims bring communal practices.

No, I've said I think it's obviously about immigration.

He is a product of immigration.

That had nothing to do with us.

How do we know?

We don't, but you're the one making the claim, not me.

I'm saying, in the context of that week, there are lots of questions to ask about to what extent was this guy integrated into wider society.

So don't ask the questions.

Don't make sweeping statements.

Here's the problem, Matt.

Your critics would say that you used to be an academic.

You sat on the Conservative coalition government's anti-Muslim hatred working group.

You used to gather data.

You used to analyse it in a sober way.

Now they say you just go on the right wing TV channel, GB News.

You write columns on the Daily Mail.

There's lots of left people on GB News.

You spout off, though.

You cut corners.

This is what they say.

You push unfounded claims.

You said on GB News, for example, falsely, and I quote, more than 50% of social housing in London is now occupied by people who are not British.

This is not acceptable.

Well, forget not being acceptable.

It's not true.

I think it's about that.

It's not.

I think it's about 47%.

It's not, actually.

The percentage of people who are not British in London social housing is about 14%.

85% of people are British citizens.

No, so my view would be, in terms of housing, we're in the middle of a housing crisis.

I think we should have a principle of national preference in our housing market.