英國世紀買賣:私有化的騙局(3)

Millions did buy shares. Most Britons, bemused by the process, assumed the main reason for privatisation was to raise cash for a desperate government. Harold Macmillan, who before his death provided a snarky Wodehousian commentary from the wings on the work of the grocer's daughter, observed in an often paraphrased line: "The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go."

數百萬人確實購買了股票。大多數英國人對這一進程感到困惑，認爲私有化的主要原因是絕望的政府想募集資金。麥克米蘭在去逝前在一部描寫零售商女兒的作品中從側面辛辣地對這種局面提出諷刺，字裏行間總會提到“國家遭遇財政困難時出賣資產的行爲與個人毫無區別。首先會變賣所有的喬治亞銀盤，然後是沙龍裏所有精美的家居，後來連卡納萊託的作品也賣了。”

Another leal privatiser, Nigel Lawson, a minister in the Thatcher government from the beginning almost to the end, dismissed the idea that the government cared about the price it was getting for selling off the family silver. Having many ordinary people owning shares, he writes in his memoirs, was the point. "The prime motives for privatisation were not Exchequer gain," he declares, "but an ideological belief in free markets and a wider distribution of private ownership of property."

另一位忠實的私有化支持者，從始至終就職於撒切爾政府的內閣大臣——勞森一直反對政府只關注於被出售資產的價格。看到很多普通民衆擁有了股票，他在回憶錄中寫道，關鍵問題是“私有化的基本目的並不是充實國庫，”他宣稱“而是要實現自由市場理想論以及私有財產能夠被更廣泛的分配。”

Neither Walters nor Lawson, nor other allies like Keith Joseph, the ex-communist Alfred Sherman or Nicholas Ridley, would have been able to implement their ideas without Thatcher herself, her extraordinary sense of the way the political wind was blowing, her conviction of her own rectitude, and the stamina and persistence with which she was able to go on insisting on something until her opponents in government gave in. Hers was a different emphasis to Walters, who saw the curbing of "bloody-minded trades unions" as a useful side effect of privatisation. For Thatcher, privatisation, in the beginning at least, was simply one of many weapons to use in her battle against the unions, which was, in turn, a single episode in her war to exterminate socialism, to be fought in one unbroken front from Orgreave Colliery to Andrei Sakharov's place of exile in Gorky. Her great political inspiration, apart from her father, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, written in Cambridge during the war. Hayek was regarded as an able economist; he eventually won a Nobel prize for it. But The Road to Serfdom isn't an economics book. It's a book about society, the recent past and human nature that bears the same relation to sociology, history and psychology as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged bears to literature. It is devoted to the idea that Winston Churchill later nodded to, catastrophically for him, in the 1945 election campaign, when he said Labour would have to fall back on "some form of Gestapo" to implement its welfare and nationalisation programme. Churchill was thrown out of office, and Labour won a huge majority.

沒有撒切爾，無論是沃特思或勞森，再或是約瑟夫、以及前共產主義者舍曼或雷德利都不可能實現他們的想法。撒切爾非凡的政治思想擴展開來，他堅信自己的正確性，並且能夠持久堅持直到政府中的對手放棄。她與沃特思強調的重點不同，不認爲建立“鐵血的行業工會”是私有化有用的副產品。對於撒切爾而言，私有化只是在她與工會鬥爭過程中衆多有用的武器之一，至少最初她是這麼認爲。反過來，這也是她根除社會主義的鬥爭中的一段插曲。從柯麗瑞到薩克洛夫的流放地——高爾基，她一直戰鬥在一個不可攻破的前沿陣地。她偉大的政治靈感除了部分源於她的父親之外，還來自一部奧地利經濟學者海雅克的一本書——農奴制之路，該書是海雅克1944年戰爭期間在劍橋所著。海雅克被公認爲一位傑出的經濟學家，最終獲得了諾獎。但《農奴制之路》並非一部經濟學著作，而是關於社會，過去以及人類本性，其對社會、歷史和人們心理的分析相當於施拉格對文學做出的貢獻。這本書貢獻的思想之後收到丘吉爾的肯定，但非常不幸，在1945年大選時，丘吉爾稱工黨註定會依賴於“某些蓋世太保式的措施”才能保證國民福利和國有化。然而丘吉爾卻被趕下臺，工黨贏得了大多數。

The Road to Serfdom claims that socialism inevitably leads to communism, and that communism and Nazi-style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany, in Hayek's view, is the centrally planned economy – as he portrays it, the attempt by a single central bureaucracy to direct all human life, to determine all human needs in advance and organise provision, limiting each to their rationed dole and their allotted task. Such a bureaucracy will no more tolerate dissent and deviation than the engineers tending a vast production line will accept a pebble jamming the gears. Confusingly, Hayek denies he is a pure libertarian, and declares the free market must have rules; he also says it is acceptable for government to "provide an extensive system of social services". Yet this is in contradiction to his main message, which is that there can be no mixture of state planning and free market competition. To him they are mutually exclusive. "By the time Hitler came to power, liberalism was dead in Germany," he writes. "And it was socialism that had killed it." Even to try to make socialism work, according to Hayek, is dangerous: "in the democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realise that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself."

《農奴制之路》宣稱社會主義不可避免的要走向共產主義，並且共產主義與納粹法西斯本質相同。按照海雅克的觀點，斯大林的蘇聯和希特勒的德國的相同點在於都是中央計劃經濟。正如他說描述的，由唯一的中央集權的官僚主義左右所有人的生活，提前確定所有人的需求，並組織分配，給每個人限定份額並且分配工作。這種官僚主義不會容忍不同觀點，趨向於建立一種只允許少量誤差的龐大生產線。令人困惑的是，海雅克否認自己是純粹自由主義者，並且認爲自由市場必須建立規則。他還宣稱，政府可以“建立一套社會服務分支系統”。但這與他的主要觀點相矛盾，即不應該存在國有計劃經濟和自由市場競爭的混合體。在他認爲，二者是互相排斥的。“當希特勒上臺後，德國的自由主義滅亡了。”他寫道“是社會主義消滅了它。”根據海雅克的觀點，即使是嘗試着建立社會服務系統也是危險的。“在民主制度下，絕大多數人仍舊相信社會主義和自由能夠共存。他們不會建立起民主的社會主義，這種過去幾代人曾嘗試過的大烏托邦，不僅不能實現，而且將走向完全相反的方向，將徹底摧毀民主。”

Author of "The Road to Serfdom" Friedrich Hayek, at the University of Chicago in 1960. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

《農奴制之路》作者海雅克，1960年在芝加哥大學。攝影：貝特曼/考比斯

Hayek was proven wrong. As in other western European countries, socialists came and went from power in Britain, introduced a welfare state and took control of large swathes of the economy without democracy and individual freedoms being threatened. The NHS was set up, council houses were built, social security was established, state education was expanded, coal, rail and steel nationalised, yet despite all the planning this required, millions of private businesses, small, medium and large, carried on merrily competing (or co-operating) with each other, flourishing or going to the wall as the market determined. Private doctors kept their clinics on Harley Street, young aristos still ruggered their way across the playing fields of Eton, the private shop windows of Harrods still blazed forth at Christmas time. Bankers and stockbrokers thronged the City, and the farmers owned their land. No one was forced by the government to live in a particular place or do a particular job. There was an argument to be made about how much tax people and businesses paid, and how much of that money government would have been better letting them choose for themselves how to spend. The argument was made, and will always be made; in the end, neither the Gestapo, nor the English Hitler, nor the English Politburo appeared, or looked like appearing.

事實證明海雅克錯了。正如其他西歐國家，社會主義者離開了英國的權力核心，來到這些國家，引入建設福利國家的政策，把持大量產業，缺乏民主，並且個人的自由也受到威脅。建立了NHS、市政廳大樓、社會保障體系，推廣公立教育，煤炭、鐵路和鋼鐵產業都成爲國有。然而，儘管所有這些都在計劃體制下，數百萬的私人產業，無論大中小型，都愉快的繼續着相互之間的競爭（或合作），市場決定了他們或是繁榮或是垮塌。私人醫生在哈利大街繼續開辦診所；年輕的權貴們依然在伊頓公學裏玩着橄欖球；聖誕時分哈羅德大街上私人商店依然燈光通明；銀行家和股票經紀人們涌入城市，並且農民們依然擁有自己的土地。政府沒有強迫任何人要居住在特定的地區或從事特定工作。曾有人針對一些問題展開辯論，包括：個人和企業要繳納多少稅賦，政府最好要有多少錢能讓人們自己支配。這種辯論正在進行，並且將一直進行下去。最終無論是蓋世太保還是英國的希特勒，還是英國的政治局都沒有出現，或者彷彿要出現。

Hayek's work, that of a frightened refugee in wartime, in the blackouts and shortages of a besieged island, had been superseded by the 1970s. A better framework for understanding the Britain of the time would have been the American Daniel Bell's masterful introduction to his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, where, though he spoke in general terms, he seemed to capture the actual contemporary problems of the UK: "A system of state capitalism could easily be transformed into a corporate state … a cumbersome, bureaucratic monstrosity, wrenched in all directions by the clamour for subsidies and entitlements by various corporate and communal groups, yet gorging itself on increased governmental appropriations to become a Leviathan in its own right." Thatcher, however, never stopped seeing the world through a Hayekian prism. After she defeated the attempt by Britain's coal miners to stave off mass redundancies and pit closures by downing tools, she wrote: "What the strike's defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left."

作爲一名受到戰爭驚嚇的難民，海雅克屈居在燈火管制物質缺乏並且受到圍困的英國。到了70年代其作品體現的思想已經被取代。這一時期更能理解英國實際情況的是美國人貝爾，他於1976年出版了個人鉅著《資本主義的文化衝突》。在按照總的說法，書中他似乎抓住了英國當時的實際問題。“國家資本主義會輕易地轉變爲國家企業化，一個臃腫又官僚的巨獸，在各個方面掙扎，各種企業和社會團體都在大聲討要補貼和授權，然而還要狼吞虎嚥的吞下政府給予越來越多的補貼，成爲擁有自主權的龐然大物。”然而，通過海雅克的角度，撒切爾從未停止過對世界形勢的分析。她挫敗了英國煤炭公司推遲遣散多餘用工以及通過罷工關閉礦井的企圖，隨後寫道“針對罷工鬥爭的勝利樹立起一種觀念，即英國不再是一種法西斯遺留的無政府狀態。”

About 10 years ago, I began to investigate what happened after the early Thatcherite zeal took effect. I was sceptical when I began my inquiries, but I was prepared to be convinced that privatisation in these half-dozen cases had been a success. I learned that it has not. Privatisation failed to turn Britain into a nation of small shareholders. Before Thatcher came to power, almost 40% of the shares in British companies were held by individuals. By 1981, it was less than 30%. By the time she died in 2013, it had slumped to under 12%. What is significant about this is not only that Thatcher and her chancellor Nigel Lawson's vision of a shareholding democracy failed to come to pass through privatisation, but that it undermines the justification for the way the companies were taken out of public ownership.

大約10年前，我開始着手調研撒切爾早期努力的成果，何時開始調查令我有些猶豫，我本以爲有六個行業的私有化已經取得成功。但事實並非如此。私有化改革並沒有使英國變成一個由小股東掌控的國家。在撒切爾上臺前，幾乎40%的英國公司股票歸個人所有。到了1981年，這一比例降低爲30%。等到撒切爾去逝的2013年，進一步縮水爲12%。重要的是，不僅撒切爾及其顧問勞森關於股權民主的思想沒有通過私有化改革得以實現，而且改革破壞了企業脫離公有的基礎。

There's no doubt that since privatisation the old nationalised industries have sacked colossal numbers of workers and brought in new technology. If efficiency is doing the same job or better with fewer workers, many of the privatised firms are more efficient. But this simply suggests some or all of the nationalised industries should have been commercialised – that is, had their subsidies shrunk and been removed from direct government control, obliging them to borrow money at commercial rates and operate in a world of market prices without making a loss. Apart from the failed attempt to encourage wider share ownership, there was no obvious reason to privatise them by floating them on the stock market and selling them to shareholders. There are many forms of private ownership. The department store chain John Lewis, an unsubsidised commercial firm in a fiercely competitive market, is owned by its employees. The Nationwide Building Society, an unsubsidised commercial firm in a fiercely competitive market, is owned by its members. The Guardian Media Group, an unsubsidised commercial firm in a fiercely competitive market, is owned by a trust set up to support its journalistic values and protect it from hostile takeover. And so on. None of the many alternatives to stock market flotation were put up for discussion by either side: it was either shareholder capitalism or the nationalised status quo.

毫無疑問，自從私有化改革以來國有行業已經遣散了很多工人，並且引入了新技術。如果較少的勞動力能夠做同樣的工作，很多私有企業效率會更高。但這隻簡單的提示了一些或者所有的國有企業，他們本應該實現商業化。這就是說，要減少對他們的補貼，並且直接脫離政府管控，迫使他們按照商業利率貸款，按照市場價格運營，不能造成損失。撇開鼓勵更廣泛持股的嘗試遭遇失敗不說，國家並沒有明顯的理由將這些企業私有化，使他們的股價浮動於股市之中，並且賣給個人持股者。應該由很多種形式的私有化。例如，連鎖百貨公司路易斯，一家沒有補貼，在激烈的市場競爭中搏擊的商業企業，其股權爲員工所有；國家建築協會，一家沒有補貼，在激烈的市場競爭中搏擊的商業企業，股權爲其委員所有；衛報集團，一家沒有補貼，在激烈的市場競爭中搏擊的商業企業，其股權歸信託基金所有，以保障其作爲媒體的價值，並且防止惡意接管。

Privatisation failed to demonstrate the case made by the privatisers that private companies are always more competent than state-owned ones – that private bosses, chasing the carrot of bonuses and dodging the stick of bankruptcy, will always do better than their state-employed counterparts. Through euphemisms such as "wealth creation" and "enjoying the rewards of success" Thatcher and her allies have promoted the notion that greed on the part of a private executive elite is the chief and sufficient engine of prosperity for all. The result has been 35 years of denigration of the concept of duty and public service, as well as a squalid ideal of all work as something that shouldn't be cared about for its own sake, but only for the money it brings. The magic dust of the market was of little use to the bosses of the newly privatised Railtrack in the mid-1990s. They thought they could sack people with impunity – not just signalling and maintenance staff but expert engineers and researchers – and carry out a massive line-upgrade cheaply with the most advanced new technology. Unfortunately the people who could have told them that the new technology didn't exist were the people they had sacked. As a result, the company went bust in 2002, and had to be renationalised.

私有化並沒有展示出私有化主人所實現的那種情況，包括：私有企業總比國有企業能力更強，私有老闆會追逐收益，並且規避破產風險，總會被國有企業負責人做得更好。通過一些委婉的言辭，例如“創造財富”和“享受成功的回報”等，撒切爾和她的夥伴們宣傳一種概念，即就一個私人管理精英而言，貪婪是首要特點，並且足以爲所有人帶來富足。結果造成35年來，責任感和公共服務一直受到冷遇，以及出現了一種骯髒的思想，即要爲自己着想，對所有工作都不比太關心，只爲金錢服務。在90年代中期，魔術般的市場籠罩並沒有爲新興私有公司英國路軌公司的老闆帶來好處。他們認爲他們解僱員工不會帶來損失，不僅解僱信號維修工，而且還有動力專家和研究人員，並且可以廉價的利用最新技術進行了線路的大規模升級改造。不幸的是，能夠證明新技術根本不存在的人正是他們所解僱的一批人。結果導致該公司在2002年破產，不得不重新迴歸國有。

A Royal Mail passes the Houses of Parliament behind it, in central London, September 12, 2013. Photograph: EDDIE KEOGH/Reuters

圖文皇家郵政在倫敦市中心通過國會大廈,2013年9月12日。攝影:艾迪·基奧/路透社

Privatisation failed to make firms compete or give customers more choice – said to be the canonical virtues of privatisation. Pretty hard, you would think, to privatise water companies, when they are all monopolies, with nobody to compete with, and can't offer customers a choice – neither the choice of which supplier to use nor the choice of whether to take a service or not. And yet the English water companies were privatised, and in such a way that customers have been overcharged ever since. The privatisers loved competition, but the actual privatised competitors hate it. The competitive vision of those who designed Britain's electricity privatisation – a rumbustious, referee-supervised free-for-all between sellers and makers of electricity old and new, large and small – has degenerated into an opaque oligopoly of a handful of giant players.

太令人失望了，也許你認爲英國水務公司的私有化將會變得更加規範強大，可是壟斷使他們沒有競爭對手，使客戶無法選擇服務和供應商，所以英國水務公司的民營化會多收老百姓的錢，商人喜歡競爭，但是在實際中又厭惡他。曾經有一個流氓一手推動英國電力的民營化創造競爭的假象，電力設施更換和創建失去裁判的監督就變成壟斷者一個人的遊戲。

The impression grows, on reading Thatcher's autobiography, that she believed the transformational effect of privatisation was such as to turn executives into self-consciously moral, patriotic, civically minded entrepreneurs like her father; as if a monopoly on water supply for several million people were a local grocery shop in a small English town in the 1940s. Privatisation, she claimed, was "the greatest shift of ownership and power away from the state to individuals and their families in any country outside the former communist bloc". The reality is that the faceless state bureaucrats of the old electricity boards have been replaced by the faceless (and better paid) private bureaucrats of the electricity companies. Not only are the privatised utilities big, remote corporations; most of them are no longer British, and no longer owned by small shareholders. Indeed electricity and water privatisation could not have failed more absolutely to foster the emergence of world-beating, innovative British companies.

讀到撒切爾的自傳，一種感想油然而生，她相信私有化改革能夠將管理層轉變爲自律、愛國、謙恭的企業家，像他父親一樣。彷彿一個掌管700萬人供水的壟斷公司應該與40年代英國小鎮上雜貨店一個樣。她宣稱，私有化是“在共產主義國家以外的所有國家內，將歸權屬從國家轉給個人及其家庭的最偉大變革。”事實是無恥的電力行業老董事會的國家官僚主義者被無恥的私人電力公司的私人官僚主義者（收益更多者）所替代。不僅大型實體、偏僻的企業變爲私有，使他們中絕大多數不再屬於英國，而且也不再由小股東掌控。事實上，電力和水利系統的私有化，完全沒有培養出具有世界影響的創新性英國企業。

Most of the electricity made and sold in England is now owned by dynamic, tech-savvy companies from western Europe, a region doomed, Thatcher thought, by creeping socialism. As a direct result of the way electricity was privatised, much of it has now been renationalised – but by France, not Britain. Of the nine big English water and sewerage firms, six have achieved the seemingly impossible feat of being privatised a second time, delisted from the stock market by east Asian conglomerates or by private equity consortia. Today much of England's water industry is, it is true, in the hands of individuals and their families, but they don't use English water; they are millions of former civil servants in Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, investing, unwittingly, through their pension funds. The National Health Service is a special case. It hasn't been privatised, and the political parties vie with each other to show that it's safest in their hands.

撒切爾認爲通過緩慢的社會主義進程，大多數英國電力企業現在必然由一個區域性集團即西歐的活躍的、高科技儲備企業執掌。一個直接的電力企業私有化成果是目前很多企業都已經重新實現國有，但卻由法國控制，而不是英國。英國九個大型水利和廢物處理企業中，有六個已經完成二次私有化這一似乎不可能實現的任務，由亞洲企業或私人實體財團掌控重新上市。目前，事實上很多英國供水企業已經掌握在私人及其家族手中，但他們自己並不使用英國的水，他們是數以百萬計的加拿大、澳大利亞和荷蘭的前公務員，退休基金管理機構在他們不知情的情況下進行了投資。國家衛生服務行業是個特例。沒有被私有化，因爲政治黨派互相競爭，以體現出將衛生服務行業掌握在他們手中最安全不過。

Yet it has been commercialised and repeatedly reorganised, with competition introduced, in such a way as to create a kind of shadowing of an as-yet-unrealised private health insurance system. The story of the transformation of the NHS is part of the wider story of the inheritance of the Thatcher legacy by a Blairite Labour administration over-filled with politicians who struggled to separate their ambitions for Britain from their ambitions for their own and their families' ascent into the six-figure-income class. After their Sisyphean struggles with the Tories and the conservative socialists in their own party, New Labour in power yielded with all too apparent relief to the charms of the business world. It wasn't the creation of foundation trusts for hospitals – or academy schools, or support for housing associations – that was the mistake, rather a lack of awareness that without elaborate safeguards these structures might prove mere waypoints to the next set of privatisations.

然而，經過商業化和反覆重組，引入競爭，這種方式造就了一種隱蔽的尚未實現的私有醫療保障系統。NHS的轉型經歷爲後人繼承撒切爾主義遺產造就了更爲寬廣的故事空間。布萊爾的工黨政府便是這樣，政府中數量衆多的政客們努力將自己的雄心壯志施加於英國，希望他們的雄心能夠使自己和後代加入六位數收入階層。他們經過與保守黨和工黨內部保守的社會主義者之間毫無意義的鬥爭，新工黨的執政團體明顯屈服於商業世界。不僅爲醫院、高校或住房保障機構創建了信託基金，而且這種錯誤相當缺乏觀念，即在沒有精心保障條件下，這種機制或許證明了僅靠信念主義必然要走向下一輪私有化。

Young children at a Bristol health centre unsure of the benefits of sun-lamps and the special glasses that must be worn, The health centre was part of the newly introduced free National Health Service in 1948 Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

在布里斯托健康中心的少年兒童享受不到太陽燈，特殊的眼鏡也註定會被用壞。建設該健康中心是1948年最新引入的國家免費健康服務制度的一部分。照片提供：蓋提圖片社

What the story of the latter years of the NHS shows is that the most powerful market force eating away at the core of the welfare state is not so much capitalism as consumer capitalism – the convergence of desires between the users of a public service and the private companies providing it when the companies use the skills of marketing to give users a sense of dissatisfaction and peer disadvantage. "If consumption represents the psychological competition for status," writes Daniel Bell, "then one can say that bourgeois society is the institutionalisation of envy." Hip replacement, a procedure invented within the NHS by John Charnley, began as a blessed relief from pain for which patients were, as Charnley said, pathetically grateful. It rapidly progressed to a rationed entitlement. It has now become a competitive market.

隨後幾年NHS演變的過程體現出最強大的市場強行吞併福利國家的根本，這並非像消費資本主義一樣的資本主義。這合併了接受公共服務的用戶們和提供服務的私人企業二者的共同願望，即當企業利用市場技能給予用戶一種不滿意感和對比同類人的劣勢感。“如果消費代表了地位方面的心理競爭，”貝爾寫道，“那麼人們會認爲資產階級的社會就是嫉妒主義體制化國家。”由查理開創的NHS的hip取代計劃，開始想爲病患減輕痛苦。正如查理自己所說，這項計劃可憐又可悲。該計劃迅速衍生爲一種合理的資格論。目前推向了競爭市場。

This points to a difficulty for anti-marketeers. Since 1945, even if privatisation had never happened, socialism would have struggled with the move from a world of unsatisfied needs to a more complex world of unsatisfied wants.

這爲抵制市場主義者造成困難。從1945年開始，即便沒有開始私有化，但社會主義者仍在進行鬥爭，從一種對需求的不滿上升到更加複雜的對不滿的渴望。

The selling off of Britain's municipal housing without replacing it was supposed to be a triumphant coming together of the individual and free market principles. It actually ended up as one of the most glaring examples of market failure in postwar history. It wasn't like the other privatisations; its justification as anything other than an electoral bribe to its relatively well-off beneficiaries always rang false. It certainly did to Thatcher in the beginning. She was, she wrote, "wary of alienating the already hard-pressed families who had scrimped to buy a house on one of the new private estates at the market price … They would, I feared, strongly object to council house tenants who had made none of their sacrifices suddenly receiving what was in effect a large capital sum from the Government".

出售英國市政房產而不是用以置換，被認爲是私有化和自由市場定律的一大勝利。事實上，這作爲戰後歷史上失敗市場的一個最爲經典的範例而結束。這不想其他的私有化。從電力系統賄賂到相對富足的福利總是經營失敗，出售英國市政房產做的更好爲私有化給出辯解理由。這當然是撒切爾一開始就做的。她寫道“擔心外來資本已經非常重視家庭需要購買一座房產，以市場價格購買私有房產。因此，我擔心他們會強烈反對市政房產的租賃者，他們沒有做出一點付出便突然享受到來自政府的大筆資產。”

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hands over the deeds to the council house belonging to the King family of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, 25th September 1979. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

1979年9月25日，英國首相撒切爾將市政住房契約交給白金漢郡彌爾頓市的皇室家族。照片提供：蓋提圖片社

In the end, she came round, and made the policy her own. But the gap where the economic rationale for privatising council houses should be becomes a window through which it becomes possible to see beyond the individual privatisations to the meta-privatisation, and its one indisputable success: that it put more money into the hands of a small number of the very wealthiest people, at the expense of the elderly, the sick, the jobless and the working poor.

最後，她出面制定了自己的政策。但市政住房私有化的經濟合理性中存在的分歧稱爲一個突破口，超越個體私有化，轉變爲半私有化成爲可能，並且取得無可爭議的成功。即把更過的資金投入到少數極其富裕人的手中，犧牲了老弱病殘者、失業者以及低收入者的利益。

What do we think we know about taxes since the Thatcher revolution? Government spending has been cut, we know that. Income tax is lower than it used to be, we know that. And we might remember that the one time Thatcher tried to change the principle of progressive taxation, where the amount of tax you pay depends on your income, to a flat fee, where everyone pays the same – when the Conservatives tried to introduce the infamous "poll tax" on council services – it was the catalyst for her downfall. Low tax was her mantra. Her core political message was this, in her own words: "I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax. That we should back the workers and not the shirkers: that it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts."

自從撒切爾改革後，我們對納稅怎麼看？我們清楚政府開支被削減。我們清楚個人收入所得隨比以往更低。並且我們或許會記得撒切爾一度試圖改變進步的稅制準則，即個人納稅多少取決於自己的收入，而對於單一稅率，做到人人相同。即保守黨試圖對市政住房徵收臭名昭著的“人頭稅”，這導致了屬於她的王朝的崩塌。低稅率令她得到褒獎。她的核心政治格言正是如此，用她的話講“我相信每個努力工作的人都應該得到最大回報，並且保有自己的稅後工資。我們應當支持工作者，而不是耍滑的人。不僅要允許，而且要讚揚那些希望通過自己努力令自己家庭受益的人。”

What we think we know is wrong. Yes, government spending was cut, and it is being cut again, by Thatcher's coalition successors. When the Conservatives came to power in 1979 the top rate of tax was 83%, the basic rate 33. The top rate is now 45% and the basic rate 20%. The message seems clear enough. The Conservatives cut public spending and cut taxes, they kept their promises to working people, and Labour went along with it. But that is not all that happened. At the same time as they cut income tax and public spending, the first Thatcher administration hiked the sales tax, VAT – a flat-rate tax far more remorselessly regressive than the poll tax. When they came to power, the main VAT rate was 8%. It is now 20%. And the poorer you are, the harder VAT hits you. A study by the Office of National Statistics in 2010 showed that, for the richest fifth of the population, VAT added an extra 4 per cent to their tax bill. But the poorest fifth, often thought by the better off to pay no tax at all, actually pay 8.7 per cent of their income to the Treasury in VAT. When the Coalition came to power that year, its first chancellor George Osborne raised VAT by 14 per cent.

我們認爲的都是錯的。確實，政府開支被削減，並且被撒切爾聯盟的繼任者再一次削減。保守黨1979年上臺時最高稅率爲83%，基本稅率爲33%。現在最高稅率爲45%，基本稅率爲20%。傳遞出的信息似乎非常明確。保守黨會削減公共開支，並且會減稅，他們爲工作者兌現了自己的承諾，並且工黨也是如此。但並非僅限於這些。在他們削減個人所得稅和公共開支的同時，撒切爾的第一屆政府拉高了銷售稅，即VAT稅——一種單一稅制，無情地倒退到比人頭稅更惡劣的程度。他們上臺時，VAT稅率爲8%，現在是20%。因此你越貧窮，造受VAT傷害越大。一項2010年國家統計辦公室的研究顯示，對於最富裕的五分之一人口，VAT只給他們納稅單增加4%。但對於人口中最貧窮的五分之一，雖然總認爲他們幾乎不用繳納什麼稅，但事實上他們向財政部繳納的VAT稅佔個人收入的8.7%。執政聯盟上臺後，其第一任總理奧斯本當年便將VAT提高到14%。

Where privatisation comes into this is that VAT isn't the only flat-rate tax on the poor. There are others, and they are onerous; they just aren't called taxes, though they should be – private taxes. One of the other ways the Thatcherites tried to balance the books in their first budgets was by hiking the price of gas, electricity and council rents, then all still under state control. After privatisation, above-inflation price rises have continued, in the private sector. A tax is generally thought of as something that only a government can levy, but this is a semantic distortion that favours the free market belief system. If a payment to an authority, public or private, is compulsory, it's a tax. We can't do without electricity; the electricity bill is an electricity tax. We can't do without water; the water bill is a water tax. Some people can get by without railways, and some can't; they pay the rail tax. Students pay the university tax. The meta-privatisation is the privatisation of the tax system itself; even, it could be said, the privatisation of us, the former citizens of Britain. By packaging British citizens up and selling them, sector by sector, to investors, the government makes it possible to keep traditional taxes low or even cut them. By moving from a system where public services are supported by progressive general taxation to a system where they are supported exclusively by the flat fees people pay to use them, they move from a system where the rich are obliged to help the poor to a system where the less well-off enable services that the rich get for what is, to them, a trifling sum. The commodity that makes water and power cables and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them. We have no choice but to pay the price the toll-keepers charge. We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here.

然而，進入私有化導致VAT並非唯一施加到窮人身上的單一稅制。還有其他的，並且繁重的支出。只不過這些不被稱作稅，雖然他們應該是——私有稅。撒切爾上臺最初幾年平衡其預算的方法之一是大幅提高石油、電力價格和市政住房的租金，當時所有這些仍舊由國家掌控。私有化以後，私有行業的價格上漲仍在繼續。通常人們認爲只有政府能夠徵收的叫做稅金，但這是一種語言遊戲，助漲了自由市場信任體系。如果把政府、公立或私立機構強制性徵收的錢款稱作稅金的話，那麼我們離不開供電，電費便是電力稅；我們離不開供水，水費便是水力稅。有些人不用坐火車，而有些人則不然，他們不得不支付列車稅。學生們要支付大學稅。半私有化實質是稅制私有化。甚至可以這樣說，這將我們這些以前的英國人民進行了私有化。通過一個行業接着一個行業，將英國人民的權益打包售賣給投資者，使得政府能夠削減傳統意義上的稅額，甚至取消他們。我們從一個公衆服務由先進的普遍稅制支撐的系統轉型出來，轉入一個公衆服務唯一的由使用服務的民衆支付單一稅費支撐的系統，通過這種轉型政府從一種強迫富人幫助窮人的體制轉變爲另一種體制，即不太富裕的人得到的服務在富人看來只是微不足道的部分。對於投資者，無論是國外國內，供水、供電以及機場等日用服務資源無比寶貴，因爲人們必不可少的要用到。我們除了按照供應商提供的價格付費，別無選擇。我們成爲人力資金流，我們成爲自己土地上的佃農，我們被捆綁在現實中存在的私有費用的繩索上。

It is not racism that makes the foreign identity of some of the owners of our privatised infrastructure objectionable. It's the selling of taxation powers to foreign governments over whom we have even less democratic control than our own. It is the hypocrisy, in particular, of a party that claims to loathe nothing more than communism and totalitarianism obliging Londoners to pay a tithe to the Chinese government just for turning on the tap.

反對外來者成爲某些私有基礎行業的主人，這並非種族主義思想。這會把將徵稅權出售給外國政府，導致我們對國內的管控甚至比管控自己更加困難。這是一種虛僞的做法，特別是對於一個宣稱極度憎恨共產主義的黨派來說，這等同於用極權強制倫敦人一開水龍頭便要向中國政府支付水費。