David Goodhart

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David Goodhart (born September 12, 1956 in London ) is a British journalist and non-fiction author.

family

Goodhart comes from a Jewish immigrant family who had risen to the British upper class , his great-great-grandfather was Mayer Lehmann, one of the founders of the investment bank Lehman Brothers . The grandfather Arthur Lehman Goodhart (1891–1978) became a law professor at Oxford , his father Sir Philip Goodhart (1925–2015) was a member of the Conservative Party , among his uncles are the upper house member Baron William Goodhart and the economics professor Charles Goodhart (born 1936) . During his time at the Financial Times , Goodhart met his future wife, the journalist Lucy Kellaway (born 1959), and the couple have four children. In October 2015, Kellaway announced the split. The couple last lived in Highbury , north London.

Career

Goodhart attended Eton College , befitting his class, and studied politics at York University . His journalistic career began in 1979 with the Yorkshire Evening Post . In 1982 he moved to the Financial Times as a journalist for twelve years in the areas of economics and politics and was its Germany correspondent from 1988 to 1991 during the German reunification . In 1995 he founded his own political magazine Prospect , for which he served as editor until the end of 2010 . After handing this position over to Bronwen Maddox , he remained with the magazine as Editor-at-Large , and in December 2011 he became director of the think tank Demos . As of the beginning of 2019, he is a member of the advisory team there, otherwise he heads the Demography , Immigration and Integration department at Policy Exchange as well as a website that also deals with questions of integration. He worked for BBC Radio 4 and is a contributor to The Guardian , The Independent , The Times and the Financial Times.

Positions

Goodhart began to develop into a Marxist at the end of his school days in Eton . According to him, the trigger was probably not the interest in the situation of the socially disadvantaged, but rather the annoyance about not having made it into the national soccer and cricket teams . He draws a comparison to the Labor politician John Strachey . Still connected to leftist ideas when he was a student , he subsequently moved to the center of politics. He began to slowly break away from the upper-class liberal consensus on immigration and multiculturalism, while at the same time developing an understanding of the values ​​of ordinary people. This included the views of a Nigel Farage who had complained publicly that he had not met a single English-speaking person on the train to London. Goodhart sees himself today as a centrist , open to ideas from both the right and the left.

Goodhart received considerable attention with an essay entitled "Too Diverse?" Which appeared in Demos magazine in 2004 . Former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission , Trevor Phillips , accused him of being a "liberal powellite ". He noted that nice people could be racist too and warned that no intelligent person could afford not to read Goodhart's post.

The British Dream

Goodhart's 2013 book The British Dream attracted widespread interest even before it was published, as it touches on topics such as multiculturalism, immigration and national identity. Here he opposes mass immigration, which not only harms the destination country, but also contributes to the home countries through brain drain and also little to global social justice. Instead, he calls for targeted funding programs to enable people to live an adequate life and make social progress in their home countries. In addition, Goodhart posits that current British society faces two main problems, both of which he attributes to this immigration. On the one hand, this is the poor economic situation of simple workers with a simultaneous decline in social mobility , on the other hand, a declining public spirit , caused by a lack of willingness to integrate. The reactions were very controversial. He was allowed to have correctly described the problems, but he had drawn the wrong conclusions. Scapegoating immigrants across the board is considered too easy. For the first time after 15 years of participation, Goodhart was not invited to the literature festival in Hay-on-Wye : The director of the event, Peter Florence, pointed out that he stood for pluralism and multiculturalism and that he therefore did not want the book to be presented. He accused Goodhart of "sensationalism".

The Road to Somewhere

In his work The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics , published in 2017, Goodhart dealt with the rise of populist movements in numerous Western countries. Here he outlined the concept of two social groups. Some , the Somewheres ( somewhere people ), are locally or regionally oriented, as a rule less educated and financially poorer. They consider changes in their environment in general, and especially immigration, to be disturbing. You are receptive to populist parties. Opposite them are the Anywheres , the everywhere people . As a rule, they have higher incomes, are characterized by greater mobility, their self-image is not tied to one place and they are open to change. They see immigration as an asset. Goodhart evaluates the successes of Donald Trump , the rise of right-wing populist parties in Germany, Austria and Italy, for example, or the unexpected success of the Brexit referendum as an uprising by the Somewheres against what they believe to be the social supremacy of the Anywheres and the lack of consideration of their interests in politics . This work also received both approval and criticism.

Fonts (selection)

Essays

  • Back from the Ruins of 1990 . In: Fabian Review , Vol. 104 (1992), Issue 5, pp. 4-6, ISSN  1356-1812
  • Britain's Glue. The Case for Liberal Nationalism . In: Anthony Giddens (ed.): The New Egalitarianism . Polity Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-7456-3431-1 , pp. 154-170.

Books

  • Eddie Shah and the Newspaper Revolution . Coronet Books, London 1986, ISBN 0-340-39263-0 .
  • The Reshaping of the German Social Market . Institute for Public Policy Research, London 1994, ISBN 1-872-45-284-1 .
  • Solutions to Unemployment in the Age of Globalization (Ditchley Conference Report). Ditchley Foundation, Enstone 1998.
  • Thinking Allowed. The Best of Prospect, 1995-2005 . Atlantic Books, London 2005, ISBN 1-84354-481-4 .
  • The British Dream. Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration . Atlantic Books, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-84354-805-8
  • The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics . C. Hurst & Co, 2017 ISBN 9781849047999

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Goodhart: How my Lehman brothers ancestors shaped America. The Sunday Times , July 15, 2018, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  2. ^ A b c David Sexton: Immigration: why the public is right. London Evening Standard , March 28, 2013, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  3. ^ Roy Greenslade: Lucy Kellaway to leave the Financial Times to become a teacher. The Guardian, November 20, 2016, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  4. ↑ a b c David Goodhart on the Demos website, accessed March 27, 2019.
  5. ↑ David Goodhart joins Demos as Director. ( Memento from March 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ David Goodhart, on the Policy Exchange website, accessed March 27, 2019. (English)
  7. ^ David Goodhart: Why I left my liberal London tribe. Financial Times, March 17, 2017, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  8. ^ David Goodhart: Why the left is wrong about immigration. The Guardian, March 27, 2013, accessed March 26, 2019. (English)
  9. ↑ Jonathan Portes: An Exercise in Scapegoating. London Review of Books , June 20, 2013, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  10. ↑ Sam Jones: David Goodhart's book on immigration earns him snub from Hay festival. The Guardian, May 27, 2013, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  11. ↑ Bettina Fernsebner-Kokert, Walter Osztovics: Everyone wants to be an island. FAZ.NET , January 15, 2018, accessed on March 29, 2019.
  12. ↑ Peter-André Alt: We want to be everywhere - and not just anywhere. Berliner Zeitung , June 8, 2018, accessed on March 29, 2019.
  13. ^ Matthew Goodwin : Shocked by populism? You shouldn't be. ( Memento from March 29, 2017 in the web archive archive.today ) Financial Times, March 29, 2017. Memento from the same day at archive.today (English)
  14. ↑ Jonathan Freedland: The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart - a liberal's rightwing turn on immigration. The Guardian, March 22, 2017, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
  15. ^ John Kampfner: The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart - review. The Guardian, March 27, 2017, accessed March 29, 2019. (English)
personal data
SURNAME Goodhart, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH London