Quick Facts
Biography
Katharine Jane "Kate" Hudson (born 1958) is a British left wing political activist and academic who is the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and National Secretary of Left Unity. She served as Chair of CND from 2003 to 2010. She has been an officer of the Stop the War Coalition since 2002.
She was Head of Social and Policy Studies at London South Bank University from September 2003 to 2010 and is now a Visiting Research Fellow. She was founding editor of the journal Contemporary Politics, serves on the editorial board of Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and is a member of the Board of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.
Hudson was a member of the Communist Party of Britain until 2011. In 2012 she joined the Respect Party, following the Bradford West by-election victory. Hudson was selected as the Respect candidate for the 2012 Manchester Central by-election but subsequently stood down in protest at "unacceptable and un-retracted statements about the nature of rape" made by the party's only MP, George Galloway. She resigned as a member of Respect in October 2012. The following March, she joined film director Ken Loach and Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in a call for a new left-wing party. Hudson has written that over 2,000 gave their support to the campaign within three days of its launch. The campaign founded the Left Unity party in November 2013, and Hudson was elected National Secretary of the organisation at its first policy conference on 29 March 2014. Serving as National Secretary for three years, the maximum term allowed, she was elected as the party's Media Officer in March 2017.
In the 1990s, Kate Hudson met and married Redmond O'Neill, (1954–2009) an activist in Socialist Action and adviser to Ken Livingstone. In 2012, Hudson married Andrew Burgin, an officer of the Stop the War Coalition and secretary of the national anti-cuts organisation, the Coalition of Resistance. Hudson is also active in the Greece Solidarity Campaign and the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.
Selected works
- CND – Now More Than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement, Vision Paperbacks, ISBN 1-904132-69-3 (2005)
- Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Pluto Press, ISBN 0-7453-1881-9 (2003)
- European Communism Since 1989, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-77342-X (2000)
- The New European Left: a socialism for the twenty-first century?, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0230248762 (2012)
- Free Movement and Beyond: agenda setting for Brexit Britain (ed), Public Reading Rooms, ISBN 978-0995535220 (2017)