Broken Hyman

Considering that he is supposedly a Deputy Headteacher, Peter Hyman seems to have an awful lot of time on his hands. Like certain others, not numerous but very noisy, he is still crying like a baby at the failure of the Labour Party to install a privatising, union-busting torturer as Leader, which would doubtless have led to the imposition on safe seats of, among other people, Peter Hyman.

Hyman claims that his hero was the choice of "the party", to which voluntarily levy-paying trade unionists apparently do not belong; of "the public", presumably more accurately reflected by full-time professional politicians and by people whose hobby is attending Labour Party meetings than by people whose political activity is normally restricted to paying the levy while otherwise going about their normal, day-today business; and of "the young", to which Hyman apparently imagines that he still belongs, which leads one to wonder how much time he actually spends in the company of his pupils. (I have no doubt about how much younger I am not getting, even if Facebook does already feature my latest batch of charges attending some or other function this Freshers' Week in T-shirts bearing the legend "I [heart] David Lindsay".)

If the Blairites honestly imagine their agenda to be so popular even without a much longer-established, and in fact antithetical, brand name, then one trusts that they are going to take advantage of electoral reform, including as it already exists for the European Parliament, by putting up on those agenda without that brand name. After all, their tiny clique of the shadowy super-rich could perfectly easily afford to fund them, as it funded their preferred candidate's Leadership bid, whereas Ed Miliband had to fall back, poor soul, on monies openly voted by large numbers of ordinary working people.

Hyman and his kind realise that 2015 will finally give the electorate something approaching the option that it would have had in 1997 if it had not lost John Smith, whom that kind utterly loathed while he was alive (they published vicious attacks on him and on his policies such as giving employment rights to temporary workers), and whom they have sought to airbrush from history ever since the happiest day of their lives, the day that John Smith died. Electoral reform offers the possibility of a body of MPs, even if initially small, to hold the Miliband Government to that inheritance. If Hyman and others think that it needs to be held to the Blair legacy instead, then they know what they need to do. They have limitless, if deeply dodgy, funds with which to do it. Will they? If not, why not?