英國世紀買賣:私有化的騙局(1)

Privatisation promised to turn the UK into an island of small shareholders. It failed: the faceless state bureaucrats have been replaced by faceless (better-paid) private bureaucrats – and big foreign corporations. How did we get to this point?

“讓每一位英國人成爲聯合王國的股東”曾是推行私有化時的承諾。這是在愚弄大衆：不知羞恥的政府官僚已經變成了不知羞恥且收入更高的私人官僚和國外大公司。我們是如何的處以上結論的呢？

London Bridge train station. Photograph: Alex Segre/FlickrVisionTrain fares are going up. We learned that last week, although "learn" is putting it strongly. We knew they would. It's not as if they would go down: train fares go up, like electricity bills, gas bills, water bills, rent and chief executives' salaries. To the loyalists of the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron succession, higher train fares are a positive, because they mean lower subsidies: another incremental step in a 35-year programme to shift the burden of paying for infrastructure from the well-off to the strugglers. To most of us, it's another sign of the folly of selling off the railways. But amid the dismal annual round of fare rises, it's easy to miss another, stranger, more gradual sign of the failure of the vast social and economic experiment conducted on the British people since 1979: privatisation.

火車票價要上漲。我們上週獲知此消息，雖然票價上漲會引起民衆的強烈不滿，但是我們知道漲價已不可避免。正如水電氣價格、租金和高管薪金一樣，火車票不會再降價了。對於撒切爾--布萊爾--卡梅倫之流的支持者來說：高票價是件好事，因爲這意味着（給鐵路系統的）財政補貼會減少。此外，過去35年中實行的按年遞增的工資制度，將基礎設施建設的財力負擔從家財萬貫者身上轉移到了勞苦大衆的肩頭。在大多數民衆看來，這又是一個出售鐵路爲荒唐之舉的標誌。但是當你爲逐年遞漲的票價而涼從心起時，卻極易忽略另一個奇怪的逐年顯現的標誌：自1979年開始，在英國推行的大範圍社會和經濟試驗——私有化改革——是失敗的。

A trio of awkward synthetic words has begun to appear among the owners of private train companies that looks as if a computer has been asked to name the new musketeers: Abellio; Govia; Keolis. What these bland corporate signifiers mask is state-owned but commercialised European rail firms. Collectively, European state railways now own more than a quarter of Britain's passenger train system.

“Abellio、Govia、Keolis”三個當代“火槍手”的名字更像是計算機起的，這三個尷尬的合成詞已經開始影響到私營鐵路公司的老闆們。這三家公司表面上平淡無奇但實際上是商業化運營的歐洲國有鐵路企業。概括來講，歐洲國有鐵路公司現在擁有超過四分之一的不列顛客運鐵路。注：Abellio是歐洲交通運輸服務商，持有英國北方鐵路50%的股份。Govia是英國鐵路運營商，其兩大股東爲Go--Ahead 和Keolis分別持有起65%和35%的股份Keolis是法國交運商。

I imagine they will do a decent job. And that's the trouble. If competition shows that the best companies to run Britain's privatised railways are state-owned railways from other countries, what does that say about the justification of privatisation? And what does it say about what privatisation has done to Britain? How did we get to the point where this country's railways, power stations and postal service were ready to be taken over by foreign versions of British organisations that our own government, claiming patriotism, systematically took to pieces?

我設想他們會幹的漂亮一些。而這正是問題所在。如果競爭顯示經營英國私有鐵路最好的公司是來自其他國家的國營鐵路公司。談何還要爲私有化辯解呢？談何實現英國鐵路私有化呢？如果國家的鐵路、電廠和郵局都準備由英國國有機構的外國翻版來接管，我們的政府爲何還要宣稱愛國，系統地分割產業，這種局面要發展到何種程度？

One winter's morning in 1991 I loaded a guitar, a condensed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and a Teach Yourself Russian course into an old Volkswagen, left the house near Edinburgh where I had been staying and drove to Kiev. Five days passed on the road. I left the familiarity, order and prosperity of Britain, the island where I had grown up, and travelled east to wait for the Soviet Union to dissolve. I didn't have to wait long. A few weeks after I arrived, it ceased to be. Russia and Ukraine went their separate ways. The Kiev traffic policeman waving down my foreign-plated car had time to utter the words, "What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" before the colour left his face, his mouth went dry, and he turned away, lost, a bully orphaned of his corporate father.

1991年冬天的一個早上，我把一把吉他、一本精煉版牛津英語字典和一本俄語自課本裝進我的老大衆汽車，離開愛丁堡的家，駛往基輔。經過5天旅程，我離開了家鄉，有秩序並且繁榮的英國，離開了養育我的英倫島，向東行駛，等待着蘇聯解體。我並沒有等太久。到了基輔幾周後，這裏不再屬於蘇聯。俄羅斯和烏克蘭分裂成兩個國家。基輔的交通警察揮手攔下了我的外國牌照車，費盡地說出幾個字“你來蘇聯幹什麼？”，隨後便面無血色，變得啞口無言，轉身走開，彷彿被他父親一樣的體制拋棄虐待的孤兒一般。

A 70-year experiment to test whether the ethos of the commune could be imposed on a transcontinental empire of hundreds of millions of people was over, long after the answer was in (it couldn't). I wasn't sorry to see Soviet communism go. Despite all that's happened since, I still don't mourn it. There was hope in the beginning that something fine would grow in the gap that was left. It was a while before I realised the cynical, grasping figures who moved in to take possession of the ruins were not, as I had hoped, transitional symptoms of change, but the essence of that change.

70年的經驗證明，強加給這個擁有數億人口橫跨歐亞的帝國的人民公社式民族精神業已破滅，結果早已註定。我對蘇聯社會主義的結局並不感到惋惜。儘管一切都很痛苦，我不會爲之感傷。在留下的裂痕中仍會爆發新生希望。轉瞬間我意識到，那些擠進來掌控廢墟的貪婪而又見利忘義的人物並非我想象的那樣，不是要帶來暫時的轉變，而是要發生實質的變革。

Ukrainian women exchange Soviet rubles against Ukrainian karbovanets, on January 17, 1992 in Kiev. Photograph: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP

1992年1月17日攝於基輔，烏克蘭婦女將蘇聯盧布兌換成烏克蘭元。

Watching the vultures come to feast on the carcass of the world's largest state-owned, planned economy, I began to find the terms to question what had been done by politicians, economic theorists, lobbyists and business people in my own country. I had thought, when I left Scotland, in the unconscious way certainties are stowed in one's mind, that I knew Britain; that some essential way of being would be resilient to Margaret Thatcher's rearrangements, which must, as transient policies, be superficial. I had to go home by way of Kiev and Moscow to see that I was wrong, to begin to see how, and how deeply, she and her followers altered Britain.

如同禿鷲們分享腐屍盛宴一般，看到這個世界上最大的國有計劃主義經濟體發生的變化，我開始質疑我的祖國裏政治家、經濟學家、遊說者們以及商人們的做法。當我離開蘇格蘭時，一種難以察覺的不確定性便一直印在我的腦海中。我知道英國必須要推出一些能夠彌補撒切爾時的改革做法的實質性措施，因爲當時只是臨時性政策，解決問題較爲膚淺。只有遊歷過基輔和莫斯科，回到祖國後我才發現自己錯了，開始明白撒切爾和她的追隨者們給英國帶來的改變會如此深遠。

With hindsight, 1991 was a pivotal year. When it began, the free market economic belief system, with its lead proselytisers Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had been pushing back for more than a decade against various attempts to impose levelling communitarianism around the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, as had communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The market belief system, which holds that government is incompetent by default, that state taxation is oppressive, that the desire for wealth is the right and principal motivator of achievement and that virtually all human wants can best be met by competing private firms, was becoming entrenched in the non-communist world, from Chile to New Zealand. Made bold by a popular public perception that government overspending and selfish organised labour were to blame for economic stagnation and high inflation in the 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan had taken on powerful trade unions, and won.

之後來看，1991是一個關鍵之年。堅定信徒撒切爾夫人和羅納德▪里根在全世界對抗各種試圖增強社區主義，使得自由市場經濟信仰體制開始的時間，推遲了十多年。正像共產主義政權在波蘭、捷克斯洛伐克、匈牙利、羅馬尼亞和保加利亞那樣，柏林牆也轟然倒塌。市場信仰體制認爲，政府本就不該干涉市場，國家徵稅是沉重的，對財富的渴望是每個人的權利，也是取得成就的主要動力，幾乎所有人的願景都能通過私有企業的競爭得到最大化的實現，從智利到新西蘭，在非共產主義世界這種觀念正在變得根深蒂固。在1970年代 ，公衆普遍認爲政府過度開支，而自私的勞工組織責備經濟停滯和通貨膨脹，因此，撒切爾和里根大膽的嘗試壯大工會組織，並取得了勝利。

Barriers to the international movement of goods and money had fallen; the European Union was, on paper, a single marketplace. In Britain, restrictions on how much ordinary people could borrow to finance their everyday needs had been scrapped, and millions had acquired credit cards. Volumes of regulations controlling how banks were allowed to use people's deposits had been torn up, and unimaginably vast sums were being moved privately from country to country. Government spending had been cut, as had income tax and corporation tax. Sales tax and fees for everyday services had been raised. Council houses and big state enterprises had been privatised, with more on the way, leading to hundreds of thousands of redundancies. Thatcher's programme in Britain was an inspiration for the IMF and the World Bank as they experimented with the conditions they attached to bail-out loans to developing countries.

國際商品和資金流動壁壘降低；而理論上歐盟則是一個單一市場。在英國，普通人可以借錢來維持他們的日常需要的限制已經取消了，數百萬計的人已經獲得信用卡。大量關於控制銀行如何才能被允許使用人們存款的法規被廢除了，難以想象鉅額財富被私下從一個國家轉移到另一個國家。政府支出被削減,就像個人所得稅和公司所得稅。銷售稅和日常服務費用已經提高。政府辦公樓和大國企已經被私有化，而更多的也將緊隨其後，導致了成千上萬的裁員。撒切爾在英國的計劃啓發了國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行，他們試圖將此作爲給發展中國家提供紓困貸款的條件。

But at the end of 1990, the triumph of marketism seemed to hang in the balance. Reagan and Thatcher had relinquished the stage to less fervent, less charismatic successors. The man who'd introduced the market economy to China, Deng Xiaoping, had been blamed by traditional communists for fostering the Tiananmen Square protests, and was in disgrace. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, the great hope of free marketeers, was facing a similar backlash from hardliners, and the Baltic countries' hopes of escape from the USSR looked bleak. Saddam Hussein, dictator of semi-socialist Iraq, had invaded semi-capitalist Kuwait.

Margaret Thatcher in Bournemouth, Dorset in 1986. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

1986年,瑪格麗特·撒切爾在伯恩茅斯,多塞特郡。攝影:David Levenson/Getty圖片但在1990年底，市場原理者的勝利似乎不再如此肯定。里根和撒切爾已經讓位給了對此更少熱情和魅力的繼承者。將市場經濟引入中國的鄧小平，受傳統共產主義批評。在蘇聯，對自由市場經濟充滿厚望的戈爾巴喬夫，同樣遭受到來自強硬派的反對，波羅的海國家希望逃離蘇聯看起來暗淡無光。半社會主義伊拉克的獨裁者,薩達姆·侯賽因，入侵了半社會主義的科威特

Yet the following year conviction began to grow among the marketeers that the final defeat of centrally planned, communitarian government was at hand, the sense that seemed to confirm such ideas as America having "won" the Cold War, and the "end of history". Early in 1991 it became clear that the Soviet leadership had lost the necessary unanimity and ruthlessness to keep Lithuania within the USSR. The humiliating collapse of the coup against Gorbachev that summer presaged recognition of Baltic independence, Ukraine's vote to go the same way, and the end of the Soviet Union. In Kuwait at the beginning of the year I saw experienced British war correspondents squabble for reporting billets among the frontline troops with the ferocity of those who believe something is being offered for the last time; we thought British and American armies might never fight another war. Few doubted Saddam would be beaten, and he was. That November, as I drove off the ferry at Ostend, heading east, it seemed a racing, expanding tide of victorious free marketism glimmered at my wheels, a tide that has gone by many names – consumer capitalism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus. Though the watchtowers still stood at the old border between two Germanys, the border was gone. In eastern Germany, the narrow cobbled streets of medieval towns had jammed solid with second-hand cars. I passed a field where an impatient western German DIY chain, unwilling to wait for steel and breeze blocks, had erected a vast, circular retail marquee, blazing with lights. The canvas superstore seemed to have landed, like a spacecraft from a flashier civilisation, come down to offer shrink-wrapped packs of rawl plugs and a choice of bathroom fittings. In Poland, I got lost in fog near Wrocław, and saw how small shops had sprung up everywhere, even in the tiniest villages. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in damp, coal-scented murk so thick I wasn't sure which way my car was pointing, I came across an entrepreneur hawking coffee from a roadside kiosk; the best coffee I ever tasted. He was like a champion of Thatcherite values, the small businessman standing ready to serve at all hours, in all weathers, making up for lost time under communism, silently mocking the market-questioning scepticisms I had brought with me from Scotland.

然而，第二年越來越多的市場人士認爲我們即將戰勝那些採取中央計劃的社會主義政權，似乎確定美國已經取得冷戰的“勝利”，並且“結束了舊的歷史”。1991年早些時候，很明顯蘇聯領導層已經失去了一致擁護，並且強制將立陶宛保留在蘇聯內部。當年夏天發生了反對戈爾巴喬夫的恥辱性政變，成爲波羅的海國家的獨立先兆。在科威特，年初我看到經驗豐富的英國記者們看到那些聞所未聞的暴行後，激烈爭論是否要報道前線部隊的部署情況。我們認爲英國和美國根本不會再次加入戰爭。很少有人懷疑薩達姆會被打敗，而他真的被打敗了。當年11月，當我在奧坦斯德駛下輪渡前方東歐時，似乎一場自由市場主義潮水般競賽式擴張就在前方，人們把這股洪流冠以很多名稱，包括：消費資本主義、里根主義、撒切爾主義、新自由主義以及華盛頓共識。雖然兩德邊境的瞭望哨仍然聳立，界牆卻已消失。在東德，狹窄的中世紀城鎮街道上堵滿了二手汽車。我路過一片田野，那裏迫不及待的西德DIY人士，不願等待鋼鐵路障的拆除，建立了一大片環形零售商業區，放出耀眼的燈光。帳篷超市似乎已經紮根，就像來自宇宙飛船上的浮華文明集市，降臨到這片土地，售賣着塑料膜包裹的初加工插座和一些浴室用具。在波蘭，濃霧導致我在華沙附近迷了路，看到小型商店如雨後春筍般出現在各個地方，甚至在最小的村莊中也能覓得蹤跡。午夜時分，在不知名的地方，煤炭的氣味非常重，以至於我知道汽車駛往何方，我碰巧進到了一個路邊的私人咖啡館裏，品嚐到從未喝過的最好咖啡。店主人是撒切爾價值觀的極度擁戴者，這位小老闆已經準備好無時無刻都要營業，以彌補共產主義統治時失去的時光，並且委婉的嘲諷了我從蘇格蘭帶來的那些對市場經濟的懷疑思想。

The effect on me of witnessing the unplanned collapse of a planned economy, where there'd been virtually no private property or private enterprise, was a series of viscerally direct lessons in economics. I saw how badly the Soviet communist system had failed on economic grounds alone, quite apart from its denial of personal freedoms. Long before the end, there was a hopeless housing shortage. Multiple households were sharing two-roomed flats; families were living in dormitories. Apartments seized from their bourgeois owners after the 1917 revolution were still unrepaired more than 70 years later. The infrastructure was rotten; there were cities and suburbs built around factories in the 1960s and 1970s where homes only had mains water for a few hours a day. Surpluses of goods nobody wanted (copies of the complete works of Soviet politicians, busts of Lenin) prevailed beside shortages of goods everybody wanted (cheese, coffee, sausage) because the element sticking together demand for a thing and the amount of trouble it took to produce and deliver it – the price – had been scraped out of transactions and replaced with a made-up figure concocted by planners in Moscow. Inequality was rampant, reflected not just in monetary wealth or property but in the degree to which you actually had access to the cheap goods everyone was supposed to have access to. One consequence of food and drink being allocated by civil servants according to central decrees, rather than by price, was that the restaurant business became an incubator for the black market and organised crime. Airports and railway stations looked like refugee camps because tickets cost virtually nothing, yet there weren't enough flights or trains to move the people who wanted to take them. The first response of the Russian and Ukrainian authorities after independence was to massively increase the production of a single essential item that people were chronically short of: money. Hyperinflation resulted, and millions of people had their savings wiped out.

看到事實上在缺少私人資產或私人企業局面下，計劃經濟出人意料的崩塌，作爲一系列針對經濟問題直插肺腑的教訓，給予我很大觸動。我看到蘇聯社會主義機制僅僅在經濟領域的表現便如此糟糕，更不用提剝奪個人自由問題。長久以來，人們對租賃住房早已失去信心。幾個家庭要共同分享只有兩個房間的公寓，家庭如同宿舍。70多年後，經歷1917年革命從資本家手中奪取的樓房年久失修。基礎建設破敗不堪。60至70年代間圍繞廠礦建立的城市和鄉鎮中，每天只有主要時段才供應自來水。由於捆綁着需求與生產供應投入（即價格）之間的元素已經完全脫離市場，並且由莫斯科的計劃者們通過定價而操縱，導致了沒有人想要的累贅（例如蘇聯政治家列寧的著作）隨處可見，人人想得到的生活必需品（奶酪、咖啡、培根）則極爲短缺。公務員們根據中央規定而不是價格因素進行食品分配帶來的後果便是餐飲行業成爲黑市和團伙犯罪的溫牀。機場和火車站看起來像難民營，因爲票價基本爲零，然而仍舊沒有足夠數量的飛機或火車運輸旅客。獨立後，俄羅斯和烏克蘭當局的第一反應便是大幅增加個人生活物資的生產。極度通貨膨脹導致長期以來人民一直缺乏貨幣，並且貨幣貶值導致數百萬人的儲蓄瞬間蒸發。

The other side of the collapse of communism, along with the post-Soviet boons of freedom of movement, freedom of expression and freedom of initiative, was the flourishing of enterprise. Armies of tough middle-aged women made epic journeys to the bazaars of Poland, Turkey and China and returned to Ukraine and Russia with clothes to dress a handsome people as they'd yearned to dress, in jeans, leather and gold. Shops, restaurants, bars, cafés and night clubs opened up; book and music stalls were everywhere. Foreign firms brought wonders: a tampon factory, international direct dialling. Kiev went from a place where you couldn't buy anything to a place where you could buy anything, if you had the means.

社會主義倒臺的另一面體現在私人企業與後蘇聯的福利包括：自由主義運動、自由言論和自由主義精神一起繁榮發展。壯碩的中年婦女大軍長途遠征波蘭、土耳其和中國的集市，把漂亮的衣服和裝飾帶回到烏克蘭和俄羅斯，因爲他們渴望着精美服飾、牛仔、皮裝以及黃金飾品。商店、餐館、酒吧、咖啡廳和夜總會紛紛開業，書店和音樂用品店隨處可見。國外企業引入了新奇理念，包括：生產衛生棉的工廠以及國際市場直銷等。基輔從一個你什麼都買不到的城市瞬間變成只要你想要便應有盡有的地方。

Contempt for the planned economy, a new appreciation of the danger of printing excess money, gratitude to the entrepreneurs – there were times, in those early months in Kiev, that I asked myself whether I was becoming a Thatcherite. I can't pinpoint the moment when it soured for me. It might have been the sight of a solid rank of impoverished pensioners, some several hundred respectable old ladies, standing shoulder to shoulder in the freezing winter darkness outside Belarus station in Moscow, each holding a single sausage for sale – the free market as desperation. Or a visit to the Arctic mining city of Vorkuta, where miners were being paid in sandwiches while their bosses pocketed the money from the coal for which they were earning free-market prices.

蔑視計劃經濟的同時，一個新的想法便是要認識到超發貨幣的危險。得益於私人企業主的啓發，在基輔的頭幾個月我很多次問自己是否也成爲一名撒切爾主義者了。令我無法回想起這種觀點何時傷害過我。或許能夠看到領取補助金的貧困人口長長的名單，看到在黑暗刺骨的冬日裏，幾百名體面的老婦人肩挨肩地排在莫斯科白俄羅斯車站外，每個人手中拿着一根培根在賣，顯示出對自由市場的絕望。或者來到北極圈中礦業城市沃爾庫塔，那裏的礦工們的工資只是一些三明治，而老闆們腰包鼓鼓，裝滿將煤炭按自由市場價格售出而竊取的金錢。

A surgeon performs a neck and throat operation in the recently opened Birmingham Queen Elizabeth Hospital Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

最近建成的伯明翰伊麗莎白皇后醫院裏，醫生們正在進行一次喉頸部手術。攝影：福隆，蓋提圖片社。