‘Handmaid’s Tale future’: Reform’s Matt Goodwin sparks outcry with fertility comments
Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection has been accused of wanting a “Handmaid’s Tale future” after unearthed YouTube footage revealed he called for “young girls and women” to be given a “biological reality” check.In a clip posted to his personal YouTube channel in November 2024, Matt Goodwin stated that “many women in Britain are having children much too late in life”.He said: “We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis.Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”The comments, first reported by the Independent, have sparked a furious backlash, with one MP describing it as an “alt right fantasy” and an equality campaigner calling it “truly troubling”.
The revelations come days after the paper revealed Goodwin previously suggested people who don’t have children should be taxed extra as punishment,Sarah Owen, the chair of the Commons women and equalities committee, said the comments were “deeply offensive” and appeared to blame women for the declining birthrate,“For anyone with fertility issues, like me who struggled with miscarriage after miscarriage, to say [to them] we should be paying more tax for not having children or that it is our fault is deeply offensive, as it is for LGBT+ people or women who can’t afford to have kids,” she said,“It’s clear he didn’t run this grotesque idea past any women in real life,”Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, who was groomed and became pregnant as a 15-year-old, said her pregnancy had happened at a “biologically great age” and she had experienced a “physically perfect pregnancy and easy birth”.
But, she added, she had been through “hell on earth”,Addressing the former academic on social media, she wrote: “Is this the kind of thing you’ll be wanting to see in our Handmaid’s Tale future?” A reference to the Margaret Atwood novel set in a dystopian future,In a separate podcast with the rightwing author and commentator Jordan Peterson, Goodwin also appeared to agree with the host’s claim that universities have become hotbeds of “politically correct authoritarianism” because they are full of “childless women”,In a February 2025 clip, Peterson said there were three predictors of “politically correct authoritarianism”, of which the first was “being female”, at which point Goodwin interjected and added: “I was going to say that,”Peterson added that an “ethos of harm avoidance” had proliferated because universities “became dominated by not only women – this is even worse, I might as well go in all the way – childless women”.
Goodwin responded: “Yeah, actually there are a couple of papers on that Jordan, I’m sure you’ve seen, I think Cory Clark.I’ve read a couple I think showing basically the feminisation of higher education over the last 50 years.”A Reform spokesperson said the two men “were discussing peer-reviewed academic studies showing clear psychological differences between men and women, which influence their views of cancel culture”.Responding to queries about Goodwin suggesting in 2023 that the government “remove personal income tax for women who have two or more children”, the party said Goodwin had not called for childless women to be taxed more but it was time for a “grown-up, mature debate about how we can encourage people to have more children and support British families”.Hannah Spencer, the Green party candidate in Gorton and Denton, said women were struggling with the cost of living, caring responsibilities and health inequalities in NHS services.
“I wish the Reform candidate put more time into addressing problems and less into looking for divisive, easy answers,” she said,Penny East, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said the “idea that we should be telling young girls they have a moral obligation to have children earlier is both dystopian and deeply sexist […] Suggesting early motherhood is a civic duty is truly troubling,”Writing on social media, the Walthamstow MP, Stella Creasy, said: “I long for the days when a midlife crisis for men like this meant getting a motorbike and a leather jacket, not trying to [get] elected so they could indulge their alt right fantasies about ensuring women were pregnant as soon as they were fertile and then didn’t go to university,”
Anthropic raises $30bn in latest round, valuing Claude bot maker at $380bn
Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $30bn (£22bn) in a funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $380bn.The company’s previous funding round in September achieved a value of $183bn, with further improvements in the technology since then spurring even greater investor interest.The fundraising was announced amid a series of stock market moves against industries that face disruption from the latest models, including software, trucking and logistics, wealth management and commercial property services.The funding round, led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the hedge fund Coatue Management, is among the largest private fundraising deals on record.“Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI,” said Choo Yong Cheen, the chief investment officer of private equity at GIC
How to deal with the “Claude crash”: Relx should keep buying back shares, then buy more | Nils Pratley
As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market. It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.Relx, the former Reed Elsevier, whose brands include the Lancet and LexisNexis, is the most intriguing in that list. The company’s description of itself contains at least five words to provoke a yawn – “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers” – but the pre-Claude share price was a thing of wonder
Share values of property services firms tumble over fears of AI disruption
Shares in commercial property services companies have tumbled, in the latest sell-off driven by fears over disruption from artificial intelligence.After steep declines on Wall Street, European stocks in the sector were hit on Thursday.The estate agent Savills’ shares fell 7.5% in London, while the serviced office provider International Workplace Group, which owns the Regus brand, lost 9%.The UK’s two biggest property developers, British Land and Landsec, dropped 2
Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January
Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority
The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers
As AI job losses rise in the professional sector, many are switching to more traditional trades. But how do they feel about accepting lower pay – and, in some cases, giving up their vocation?California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university. Though she hadn’t been able to make a full-time living from her favourite pastime – fiction writing – post-university, she consistently got writing work (mostly content marketing, some journalism) and went freelance full-time when she was 26. Sure, content marketing wasn’t exactly the dream, but she was writing every day, and it was paying the bills – she was happy enough
Is it possible to develop AI without the US?
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Today in tech, we’re discussing the Persian Gulf countries making a play for sovereignty over their own artificial intelligence in response to an unstable United States. That, and US tech giants’ plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone.I spent most of last week in Doha at the Web Summit Qatar, the Gulf’s new version of the popular annual tech conference. One theme stood out among the speeches I watched and the conversations I had: sovereignty
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