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本片由人文经济学会资助译制 中英对照文本 翻译：Mangosteen 校对：FungChuh If you think the world is a mess now, that just means you weren’t around in the 1970s. 如果你认为当下的世界一团糟，只意味着你没有生活在 1970 年代。 In Britain, where I grew up, the low point was known as “the winter of discontent,” a line borrowed from Shakespeare’s Richard III. 在我成长的英国，这一低谷期被称为「不满的冬天」，引用自莎士比亚的作品《理查三世》。 The inflation rate in 1975 was 27 percent. The trains were always late. The payphones were always broken. Nothing worked. 1975 年的通胀率是 27%。火车经常晚点。付费电话亭总是坏的。什么都是坏的。 Worst of all were the recurrent strikes. Strikes by coal miners. Strikes by dockers. Strikes by printers. Strikes by refuse collectors. Strikes even by gravediggers. 最糟糕的是频发的罢工。煤矿工人罢工。码头工人罢工。印刷工人罢工。垃圾收集员罢工。甚至连掘墓人也罢工。 It felt as if there was no way back. And then came Margaret Thatcher. 似乎已经无路可退了。接着玛格丽特·撒切尔出场了。 Between May 1979, when she entered 10 Downing Street as prime minister, and November 1990, when she stepped down, she changed everything. 从 1979 年五月她走进唐宁街 10 号就任首相，到 1990 年十一月她卸任，她改变了一切。 Born on October 13, 1925, she was an improbable savior. Nothing in her middle-class childhood suggested the future ahead of her. A diligent student, she got into Oxford as a chemistry major. She worked for a small plastics company after leaving college but was rejected for a position at the British chemical giant ICI because, as the personnel report stated, “This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated.” 她出生于 1925 年 10 月 13 日，不太可能是位拯救者。中产阶级童年生活没有预示出她的未来。这名刻苦的学生进入了牛津大学的化学专业。毕业后她在一间小型塑胶制品公司工作，但申请英国化工巨头帝国化学工业（ICI）的职位被拒绝了，因为人事报告说：「这名女性生性固执、倔强，极其刚愎自用。」 She needed all three of those attributes when she entered the world of politics as a Conservative candidate in 1950. After several failures, she finally entered Parliament in 1959. For the next two decades, she steadily worked her way up through the party ranks. 当 1950 年作为保守党候选人步入政坛时，她需要这三种特征。经历若干失败后，她终于在 1959 年进入议会。接下来的二十年里，她稳步走上保守党高层。 As early as 1975, Thatcher had come up with a wonderful line about the opposition Labour Party: “They’ve got the usual Socialist disease—they’ve run out of other people’s money.” This she contrasted memorably with what she called “the British inheritance”: “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master …” 早在 1975 年，撒切尔对于对手工党就有过一句妙语：「他们有一个社会主义常见病——花光别人的钱。」与之对比的是她所怀念的「英国遗产」：「人们有权按自己意愿工作，花自己挣的钱，拥有财产，做国家的主人而非仆人……」 This was the essence of Thatcherism, and it was just the tonic that the patient—the British economy—needed. It’s fashionable nowadays to argue that there was no Thatcher miracle in the 1980s. Not only is that demonstrably false, it misses an essential point: Thatcherism wasn’t just about raising productivity or creating jobs. Just as important was the goal of defeating inflation and restoring prosperity to the middle class. This it emphatically achieved. 这是撒切尔主义的精髓，是英国经济这个患者所需的补药。时下流行的看法是 1980 年代并不存在撒切尔奇迹。这个说法不仅可证明是错的，它也忽视了关键的一点：撒切尔主义不仅在于提高生产率或创造就业。同样重要的还有战胜通胀，恢复中产阶级的繁荣的目标。它无疑是实现了的。 Yet the event that, more than any other, defined Margaret Thatcher’s premiership was not economic but military. The Falklands War against Argentina established her irrevocably in the public mind as the new Britannia, a warrior queen who gloried in victory. And, of course, it ensured a Conservative win in the 1983 election. 玛格丽特·撒切尔的首相生涯最大的成就不在经济方面，而在军事。对抗阿根廷的福克兰战争牢牢树立起她在公众眼中的新不列颠尼亚形象，一位战绩赫赫的武士女王。当然，它也确保了 1983 年大选保守党的胜利。 There is no question that sending the Royal Navy Task Force to the South Atlantic took great political courage. Many in her own party pushed for a negotiated settlement. But the lady was not for turning—not because she was nostalgic for the days of empire, but because the invasion was, to her mind, morally and legally wrong. 派遣英国皇家海军特遣队到南大西洋无疑需要巨大的政治勇气。不少党内人士敦促通过协商解决。但这位女士不会妥协——不是因为她怀念昔日帝国，而是因为在她看来这次入侵从道义上、法律上都是错的。 Not without reason did a Soviet magazine nickname Thatcher “the Iron Lady.” Along with her ideological soulmate, US President Ronald Reagan, she was unhesitating in her opposition to the Soviet Union. When the Soviets deployed intermediate range nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe, she fully supported—despite fierce opposition—Reagan’s counter-move to send American cruise and Pershing missiles to Western Europe. 一份苏联杂志给撒切尔取绰号「铁娘子」不无理由。她和她思想上的知己，美国总统罗纳德·里根一起，在反苏联立场上毫不迟疑。当苏联在东欧部署中程核导弹时，她全力支持——不顾激烈的反对——里根的对策，运送美国巡航导弹和潘兴导弹到西欧。 It’s still terribly hard for those who opposed her to admit it, but Margaret Thatcher was right about most things. She was right that the British trade unions had become much too powerful. She was right that inefficient nationalized industries had to be privatized. And she was right that the West could win The Cold War. 让那些反对她的人承认仍然是极其困难的，但玛格丽特·撒切尔多数时候是对的。她对英国工会变得太过强大的判断是对的。她认为效率低下的国有企业必须私有化的看法是对的。她认为西方能赢得冷战的判断是对的。 “I can’t bear Britain in decline,” she told a BBC interviewer in April 1979. “I just can’t.” Nor could we. For much of the 1970s, that decline had looked irreversible. Yet Margaret Thatcher stopped the rot. She cured the economy of the disease of inflation and industrial unrest. She revived the idea of a property-owning democracy. And, with her courageous and principled foreign policy, she restored Britain’s standing in the world. 「我不能接受英国在衰落，」她在 1979 年四月对 BBC 的采访员说：「我就是不能。」我们也不能。在 1970 年代的很长一段时间里，衰落似乎是无可挽回的。然而玛格丽特·撒切尔阻止了形势恶化。她挽救了罹患通货膨胀和工业动荡的经济。她复兴了财产所有民主制的理念。而且，由于她果敢坚定的外交政策，她恢复了英国在世界上的地位。 Those of us who stood by her are entitled to feel proud that we were on history’s winning side. But we should have no illusions about the humble supporting roles we played. She was the leader, proof that sometimes it really is a single individual who can change the course of history—in Margaret Thatcher’s case, decidedly for the better. 我们这些与她站在一起的人有权为我们站在胜利的一方而感到骄傲。但对于我们所扮演的卑微的支持者角色，我们不应该保有任何幻想。她是领导者，证明了有时候单单一个人就能改变历史进程——就玛格丽特·撒切尔而言，无疑是往更好的方向。 I’m Niall Ferguson, fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for Prager University. 我是尼尔·弗格森，斯坦福大学胡佛研究所研究员，为 PragerU 制作。 |
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