I'd say it is a pretty accurate and succinct summary of the man. For a more detailed counterpoint to Goodwins claim:
When he says a passport is “just a piece of paper” and that those who commit atrocities are “not really British,” he’s making a moral claim that quickly unravels.
If murdering civilians makes someone “not British,” then that logic must apply to Dunblane, Cumbria, Hungerford, IRA attacks, the London Nail Bombings, the murder of Jo Cox, and every other atrocity committed by white British citizens. You can’t apply the standard only when it suits a narrative.
And once you start defining “true” Englishness or Britishness, history gets awkward pretty fast. For centuries, Catholics were treated as not fully English, politically suspect, excluded from office, seen as loyal to Rome over the Crown. Yet at the time of the Reformation, Catholicism was the traditional religion of England. You could just as easily argue that breaking from Rome was the radical, anti-traditional, anti-English move. Was Henry VIII a traitor to England and its cultural values? Was Guy Fawkes actually the hero of the story? Which version is truly English?
Medieval Catholic England? Tudor Protestant England? Victorian imperial Britain? Modern liberal democracy?
There isn’t a single, timeless identity. It has shifted repeatedly. That’s why the only stable definition is civic: if you are a British citizen, you are British. Crimes don’t retroactively erase nationality, they represent a betrayal of shared values. Once you start deciding who is really British based on their behaviour, religion, or culture, you’re not defending national identity you’re redefining it case by case. And history shows how dangerous and inconsistent that becomes.
Not an equivalence, but a reminder that the suffragettes were at the time denounced as extremists, a threat to the nation, and un-British. The likes of Goodwin that draw hard cultural lines today would have drawn them then, too.