Peter Hyman

20 July 2009

What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?
I teach a Somali boy who is stunningly bright and hard working. He is shy, modest, gentle, and lacking confidence. I fear that coming from a comprehensive on the outskirts of London he will not have the networks and contacts, the openings and lucky breaks. Over time the pressures may be too great, the poverty too grinding, the setbacks too tough for him to succeed. I am on the Left because for him and thousands of children just as bright and not as bright as him, I want there to be no barrier of snobbery, race, or class that stands in the way. The Left will always be instinctively on his side; the Right, however much they try, will not be. Progress, the point of being Left, is to give the underdog as equal a chance as possible of getting on in life.

What do you consider made you Left wing?
My parents and Thatcher made me left wing. My mother is a refugee to this country fleeing anti-semitism. Her experience has given me an anger against injustice and prejudice. My father taught me to think about what was right and wrong in the world around me. He taught me a love of politics and books. I grew up restless. I grew up shaped by my horror at what I thought the Thatcher government was doing to the country.

At least Thatcher was attempting to change things. The one philosophy I could never understand was conservatism – why would anyone spend their life trying to defend the status quo. This struck me as defeatism of the worst kind – what sort of society cannot be improved, what sort of person does not want to get better, what kind of dreary attitude is ‘mustn’t grumble’?

How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?
Creative, innovative, adventurous, tolerant – where we value curiosity and risk taking not just logic and career paths. Where we judge our influence not by the deployment of our army, but the talent and ideas of our people. A society where by the age of 18 young adults have the tools and commitment to be fully participating, confident, actively engaged, responsible citizens.

What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?
Improved literacy – because if you can’t read properly the life ahead is so much duller, so much narrower, so much less successful. Words, instead of being the key to a life of exploration, become grains of boiling sand in a never-ending desert.

More ‘thinking’ – children need to be taught to think not just spew out facts. Our exam system, defended to the hilt by the forces of reaction, does not measure the ability to reason, synthesise, create, analyse, justify, or pursue intelligent questions.

What most makes you angry about the way Britain is now?
It angers me that political debate is so constrained that no adult dialogue can really happen. This ensures policy making is too headline-driven and the boring but essential reforms often get marginalised.

It angers me that we retain so many of the nonsensical traditions from Britain’s past – an absurd honours system, largely unreformed House of Lords, archaic House of Commons, unmodernised civil service.

Most of all, it angers me that too many children are so disadvantaged by the age of five that they will spend the rest of their childhood battling to catch up.

Which person, event, era or movement from the past should we look to for inspiration now?
I am teaching the Black civil rights movement to GCSE students this year. I tried to explain the tangled thread that draws together slavery and Obama’s presidency via Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. That sense of a cause worth fighting for is what we need now on the Left – and there are plenty of good causes remaining: not least the “achievement gap” between a teenager from the wealthiest and the poorest families. The Right doesn’t do causes. The Left in this country seems, at times, to have stopped too. A cause is better than a policy. A cause beats a White Paper. A cause builds a movement; a movement gives people power. In this pragmatic, globalised age, unless it has a heart as well as a head, the Left is dead.

11 Comments

11 Responses to “Peter Hyman”

Paul Jeremy
July 20th, 2009 @ 1:11 pm

What a depressing insight these Open Left contributors provide into the present day Labour Party. I've been a Labour voter for 44 years but no more; these contributors just confirm to my mind why New Labour must be defeated at the next election. Not a single one has a word to say about New Labour's database state and assault on civil liberties. This authoritarianism has alienated many on the Left: a party with such a contempt for privacy and fundamental freedoms is in deep ethical straits
treborc
July 20th, 2009 @ 11:03 pm

Paul Mate you and me too, I've been in labour 44 years and now I've left, if people like us leave after going through thick and thin within Labour something is wrong.

They called me an activist , I just helped out when needed, but boy I wasted 44 years of my life.. I'm not sure whom I will be voting for at the next election but I know one thing it will not be for this bunch.
CG
July 20th, 2009 @ 11:43 pm

‘The one philosophy I could never understand was conservatism – why would anyone spend their life trying to defend the status quo.’

i'm physically disabled, engaged in a constant struggle against inequality, and yet identify more readily with conservatives. I'm deeply skeptical of various aspects of labour's approach to special needs policy and believe that, properly applied, conservative principles would operate better.

I find cynical allusions to a label to form the sole basis of criticism against it cheap, patronising and intellectually lazy .
Kevin
July 21st, 2009 @ 9:27 am

I'm not a conservative because I don't want the world to be a better place. I'm a conservative because I believe that history shows that every serious attempt to use the state's power create a fairer, more equal society has ended in disaster. Social reform is simply a matter of replacing one set of problems with another. Inequality of income and status has been a feature of every human society that has ever existed. It's a fact of life, like the weather or the seasons and leftists need to face up to this and stop their counter-productive meddling.
JacobFreeze
July 21st, 2009 @ 9:50 am

Peter Hyman says…

“The one philosophy I could never understand was conservatism – why would anyone spend their life trying to defend the status quo. This struck me as defeatism of the worst kind – what sort of society cannot be improved?”

Leaving aside his fantastical claim to understand all philosophies except conservatism, it isn't much of a recommendation for Mr. Hyman that he can't imagine any other form of political thinking except the way he thinks, but within the claustrophobic margins of the tiny square for writing comments on this website, I might as well try to shed a minimum of political enlightenment upon his miserable narrow-mindedness.

Who would want to defend the status quo? Anyone who wants to save the last few whales in the ocean, anyone who wants to preserve the last few acres of rain-forest in Amazonia, anyone who wants to defend the last few family farms in France.

Who would want to preserve the status quo in AD 1600? Maybe anyone who wanted to hold onto four acres and a share of the village commons, before he or she was driven off the land by Jacobean “progressives” who enclosed the commons and drove small farmers into the slums of London, “for the betterment of humanity.”

“Progress” has almost destroyed our planet, and Mr. Hyman can't imagine why anyone would object. Obviously one note on a website won't “wise him up,” but luckily for Mr. Hyman, Islamic traditionalists have discovered a more effective process for projecting some comprehension of a different world-view into the otherwise opaque bourgeois consciousness of people like Peter Hyman.
michael_green
July 21st, 2009 @ 9:55 am

Nonsense. The Universal education, healthcare and childcare systems have been a huge success in all the countries implemented, Minimum wage, child tax credit and working tax credit have also been huge successes. These are all natural developments in any democratic country. Kevin we know your a liberal.
ash_cash
July 21st, 2009 @ 12:41 pm

“one policy I could not understand was conservatism”. conserve….to retain the very best and the worst aspects of society….. very much like fossilisation….that though can be used to create green energy..
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so conservatism is ok…if we are able to retain the very best of the past- pride in our country and our terrific values. But,
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surely we are out of sync,,,,,with ourselves. our children are the unhappiest. our families do not work….in the main. Surely we do not wish to conserve this.
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But given that Rome was not built in a day. We need to consolidate the gains of the past and move forward inch by inch. and make sure that we do not lose these gains…..either through our intoxication.
or our immaturity.
create inner calmness. ………….is it true that we do not appear to be very self aware nation? The best school in London apparently is a Sikh school. The 3 main virtues of Sikhism applies to this great country of ours big time. The second virtue is to do an honest day's work and the third being to share.
What the left thinks of the right | Newpapers Collected
July 22nd, 2009 @ 10:06 pm

[...] teacher who wrote a very good book about the move and is on Newsnight’s political panel, responds to the question as [...]
Alfred T Mahan
July 22nd, 2009 @ 6:37 pm

I really don't know how you can say that the current British educational system, let alone the NHS, is a huge success. Since the abolition of the grammar schools social mobility has reduced, and the quality of our teaching is third world. That's why so many parents are prepared to make sacrifices to educate their children privately. Is that the kind of success you really want?

I now work in social care after a successful City career, and so much more could be done for the vulnerable in society if delivery systems were structured differently, more along market lines. It is a huge sadness that so many on the left think that there is only one way to provide for those at the bottom end of life, which is by heavy-handed bureaucracy.

Please, Lefties, don't insult those who agree with your ends (well, most of them anyway) but disagree about method by saying they're not on the side of the underdog. It's not necessarily correct – just as it's wrong to say the present Labour government is not now the Establishment. It is.
michael_green
July 23rd, 2009 @ 1:51 pm

Social care worker's of yourself may need less beauracracy, but do you need more consumer exploitation to run a decent social care system?

The problem with consumer markets is that they don't distribute resources to those who need them, they're not democratically accountable, and it's a case of first come first serve, leaving aside the inequalities of wealth they produce.

America's healthcare system is a shambles, over 33% of 20-30 year olds have no healthcare. It is stifling the economy, and wastes money on people who aren't sick, but fails to treat people who are sick.

Public services must be PUBLIC, as in collectively owned, not privately. It's the most cost effective, democratic and just way to distribute welfare resources.
JeffMowatt
July 26th, 2009 @ 7:18 pm

Well guys, me too and my father who'd been a labour voter for nearly 70 years.

He'd written complaining about the removal of clause 4, asking how long before Labour removed socialism. He didn't have long to wait.

I see New Labour with its cabal of “know best” lawyers as having lost sight of the real target. While they direct so much energy into punishing the 'toff' for his hunting inclinations, they lose sight of the real obstacles to social progress, in the shadowy oligarchs who predate human life.

Orthodox capitalism, unconstrained by democratic governance yields human trafficking, child prostitution and pornography, epidemic HIV rates and the most vulnerable and disabled used as a cash crop until they're disposed of.

These are not people who participate in these act directly, yet they leave others without hope, acting out of desperation to survive. Here they are welcome to do business.

Orthodox capitalism based on greed and the accumulation of wealth as abstract numbers has no conscience, therefore those most vulnerable are disposable.

Until New Labour finds itself a collective spine in this regard, I'll ask them to “lead, follow or stand out of the way”