Alan Hudson

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Alan Hudson (Date of Birth: 04/01/1951) is an academic and is associated with the libertarian anti-environmental LM network. He was a director of the RCP publications company Junius Publications from before 1992 until it was wound up in 2000 and wrote an introduction for a book published by Junius for Living Marxism in 1995. He has spoken at the Battle of Ideas, an Institute of Ideas event, the Manchester and Leeds Salons and for WORLDwrite. He has written for Culture Wars, Channel Cyberia and Spiked, co-wrote a book with Dennis Hayes and contributed to a book for Audacity. . He was one of the first fifty signatories to the statement by the Academics for Academic Freedom.

Career

• 1996 Education lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church College
• 2000 senior lecturer in education and social theory at Canterbury Christ Church University College
• 2001-2003, Director of Social and Political Science at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education teaching courses on The Politics and Government of the United Kingdom and the European Union, Social Policy and Research Methodologies and Political Ideologies.
• 2003-present Director of Oxford University’s Leadership Programmes for China. In the last five years he has been responsible for writing the curriculum training programmes in UK public policy and public administration which have been delivered to over 1000 senior Chinese public officials at municipal, provincial and national level including national ministers.

Research and writing

Hudson assisted Dennis Hayes in writing an updated report on Basildon. Hayes, 'was part of the team which first investigated the phenomenon of Basildon Man after the 1992 election.' At the time this was reported in the press as having been written by Frank Furedi and Joan Hoey, both leading members of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In the 2001 report Hudson and co-author Dennis Hayes studied the alleged effect of Thatcherism on the working class by focussing on the allegedly key area of Basildon:

Remember Basildon man? Or his close neighbour, Essex man? Back in the late eighties and early nineties, these stereotypical figures were invoked whenever politicians or editorial writers wanted a shorthand way of representing the new face of the British working class. These shell-suited, vulgar, 'loadsamoney' characters were said to have forsaken their traditional allegiance to the cloth cap Labour party and to have found a new home in a Conservative party only too happy to champion individuality and self-betterment. They were hardly an admired cross-section of the population, but the notion that they were a new political entity was a powerful impetus to the creation of New Labour and the 'third way'. But sociologists Dennis Hayes and Alan Hudson were able to raise serious doubts about Basildon man's reality. In a 1992 survey, the year Basildon re -elected its Conservative MP, they found little of the brash aggressive materialism they had been led to expect.

Hayes and Hudson then produced a second study with data collected in 1997. the study was published as a research report and by the New Labour think tank Demos:

Hayes and Hudson were sufficiently fascinated by the working class attitudes they unearthed to undertake a second, more extensive survey of the town in 1997. In their new book based on this work, The Mood of the Nation: Basildon Man Revisited (Demos), they provide further evidence for their original argument that Basildon Thatcherism was only skin deep.

Publications

• Alan Hudson, Dennis Hayes and Toby Andrew, 1996, Working Lives in the 1990s: Preliminary findings of the Attitudes to Work Survey, London: Global Futures. ISBN 101901051005
• Frederick Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, with an introduction by Alan Hudson, London: Junius Publications, 1996.
• Dennis Hayes & Alan Hudson, Who are the C2s? A Social and Political Attitudes Survey, Basildon 1992: Basildon Revisited - Change and Continuity, Education and Work Research Group, 2001
• Dennis Hayes and Alan Hudson Basildon: The Mood of the Nation, London: Demos, 2001
• Dennis Hayes & Alan Hudson, The Mood of the Nation: Basildon Man Revisited, Demos, 2000