Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, founding editor of New Left Review and director of the Birmingham cultural studies centre
In January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher took office, his "The Great Moving Right Show" in Marxism Today analysed Thatcherism as a new right-wing politics rooted in the disappointment of much of the working class.
A Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist and cultural theorist from a middle-class family in Kingston. He came to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951 to read English, and in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez Crisis abandoned his doctorate for political work. After Universities and Left Review he became the founding editor of New Left Review in 1960. Invited by Richard Hoggart to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964, he was its acting director from 1968 and director from 1972 to 1979, widening cultural studies to race and gender. He is known for "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), the co-written Policing the Crisis (1978) and his analysis of Thatcherism, and was professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997.