英国政党大会季的结束和新一届议会的开启，是评估其政治状况的良机。绿党是新的“讨厌党”，比保守党曾经的样子还要糟糕。中间派自由民主党是“毫无意义党”。奈杰尔·法拉奇（Nigel Farage）的英国改革党是“褪色党”，而保守党则是“努力党”。
The end of Britain’s party conference season and the beginning of a new parliament is a good opportunity to assess the state of its politics. The Greens are the new Nasty Party, worse than the Tories ever were. The centrist Liberal Democrats are the Pointless Party. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is the Fading Party, and the Conservatives are the Trying Hard Party.
阿德里安·伍尔德里奇（Adrian Wooldridge）撰文：那工党呢？他们是英国的“冷酷党”，为了获胜愿意做任何事。尽管有关于重拾进步灵魂的种种言论，但工党的冷血使其成为过去时代残酷保守党的天然继承者——即便在政策上并非如此，但在性格上确实如此。
By Adrian Wooldridge And Labour? They are Britain’s Ruthless Party, willing to do anything to win. For all the talk of recovering its progressive soul, Labour’s cold-bloodedness makes it the natural successor to cutthroat Tories of times past — in character if not in policy.
老保守党人只致力于一件事：权力。他们想要享受权力的果实。因此，该党历史上反复出现相同的家族姓氏（皮尔、索尔兹伯里、张伯伦），也因此，其党内运作人员在罢黜陷入困境的首相时表现得冷酷无情。最重要的是，他们想要执政，以便维护一个他们从中获利的既定秩序。
The old Conservatives were dedicated to one thing: power. They wanted to enjoy its fruits. Hence the recurrence of the same family names in the party’s annals (Peel, Salisbury, Chamberlain), and hence the ruthlessness with which its operatives dispatched ailing prime ministers. Above all, they wanted to rule so that they could preserve an established order from which they profited.
他们也是转移公众对社会不公关注的高手，通过将人们的目光引向别处：引向帝国的荣耀、君主制的威严或法国人的卑劣。他们还是沉浸在怀旧情绪中的巫师。他们让每个人对英国乡村的美景产生如此多的感伤，以至于公众忘记了其中大部分土地是由姓氏如卡文迪什（Cavendish）和克兰伯恩（Cranborne）的人所拥有的。
They were masters, too, of distracting people’s attention from social injustices by directing their gaze elsewhere: to the glories of empire, the majesty of monarchy or the vileness of the French. And they were wizards at bathing in nostalgia. They made everyone so sentimental about the beauty of the English countryside that the public forgot that much of it is owned by people with names such as Cavendish and Cranborne.
在会议季阅读约翰·拉姆斯登（John Ramsden）所著的保守党史时，我发现自己想到的不是凯米·巴德诺赫（Kemi Badenoch）那支倒霉的现代保守党团队，而是“安迪的军队”。那场用安迪·伯纳姆（Andy Burnham）取代首相基尔·斯塔默（Keir Starmer）的工党政变，是一场冷眼旁观的犬儒主义杰作。他的支持者，特别是埃德·米利班德（Ed Miliband）和路易丝·黑格（Louise Haigh），早在两年前就开始策划，他们甚至没有经过党内成员，更不用说全国选民，就移除了斯塔默，免去了这些“麻烦”。
Reading John Ramsden’s history of the Conservatives, , during conference season, I found myself thinking not of Kemi Badenoch’s hapless modern Tory crew but of “Andy’s Army.”The Labour coup that replaced Prime Minister Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham was a masterpiece of cold-eyed cynicism. His supporters, notably Ed Miliband and Louise Haigh, started plotting as long as two years ago, and they removed Starmer without the inconvenience of going to the party’s members, let alone the country.
与过去的保守党相似之处不仅于此。对于一个致力于机会平等的政党，工党却出人意料地充斥着家族关系。有前任要人的儿子（斯蒂芬·金诺克和哈米什·法尔科纳），夫妻档（伊薇特·库珀和埃德·鲍尔斯），还有兄弟姐妹组合（埃德和大卫·米利班德，瑞秋·里夫斯及其姐妹埃莉，老鹰双胞胎）。自19世纪末至20世纪初以来，我们从未见过如此情况，当时内阁被称为“塞西尔酒店”，因为它充斥着首相罗伯特·加斯科因-塞西尔（索尔兹伯里伯爵）的亲戚。
The similarities with Tories past don’t end there. For a party dedicated to equal opportunity, Labour is surprisingly riddled with family connections. There are sons of former grandees (Stephen Kinnock and Hamish Falconer), husband and wife teams (Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls) and bands of siblings (Ed and David Miliband, Rachel Reeves and her sister Ellie, the Eagle twins). We haven’t seen anything like this since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Cabinet was known as “Hotel Cecil” because it was stuffed with the relatives of PM Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury).
他后来被侄子亚瑟·巴尔福继承权力，普及了“Bob’s Your Uncle”这一说法。工党也已取代成为更富裕阶层的政党——拥有大学学历、中产阶级生活方式和稳定就业的人群。去年英国选举调查的一项民意调查显示，工党在收入最高选民（年收入超过7万英镑，约9.3万美元）中的得票率占比，相较于收入最低选民（年收入低于3万英镑）的比例，高于任何其他主要政党。
He was succeeded in power by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, popularizing the phrase “Bob’s Your Uncle.”Labour has also taken over as the party of the better off — people with university degrees, middle-class lifestyles and stable employment. In a poll by the British Election Survey last year, the ratio of Labour’s vote share among the richest voters (earning more than £70,000, or $93,000) to the poorest voters (earning less than £30,000) was larger than any other major party.
其关于工人阶级和“矿工灯”的所有谈论，不过是部落派的胡言乱语。如果你今天想遇见真正的工人阶级人士（而他们中的大多数对政治不感兴趣），你更应该去参加改革英国的聚会。
All its talk about the working class and “miner’s lamps” is tribal hooey. If you want to meet real working-class people today (and most of them aren’t interested in politics) you are much better off going to a Reform UK gathering.
工党不再代表被边缘化的人群——无论是在经济上还是其他方面——而是成为了现状的守护者。它如今是公共部门专业人士、非政府组织官员、有 tenure 的学者、地方政府雇员、教师、医生和蝙蝠检查员的政党。其选民和活动家相比其他政党更有可能享有稳定收入（以及与通挂钩的养老金），这得益于纳税人。而且他们更可能拿出大学学历来证明自己的道德价值，就像老派保守党可能会亮出他们的家族纹章一样。
Rather than speaking for the marginalized — economically or otherwise — Labour has become the guardian of the status quo. It’s now the party of public-sector professionals, NGO functionaries, tenured academics, local-government employees, teachers, doctors and bat inspectors. Its voters and activists are more likely than those in other parties to enjoy stable incomes (and index-linked pensions), courtesy of the taxpayer. And they are more likely to brandish their university degrees as proof of their moral worth, just as old-fashioned Tories might have wielded their coats of arms.
加斯科因-塞西尔曾说过：“对激进主义的敌意，那种持续不断、毫不妥协的敌意，是保守主义的精髓。”这句话同样可以用来描述现任工党对任何挑战其核心基本盘——公共部门——的新颖思想所持的态度。上届保守党政府唯一无可争议的成就是在教育领域。英国学童在阅读、数学和科学方面的表现位居全球前十，在东亚以外地区排名第二。
Gascoyne-Cecil once said that “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essence of Conservatism.”That could just as easily describe the current Labour Party’s attitude toward any novel ideas that challenge its core base, the public sector. The last Conservative government’s one undisputed success was in education. English schoolchildren are in the top-10 globally for reading, math and science, and in second place outside East Asia.
这一成就得益于保守党教育大臣迈克尔·戈夫在2010年至2014年间推行的改革，这些改革提高了学校课程的要求，赋予了教师更多权力，并鼓励了不受地方政府控制的学院制学校的发展。
This was driven by Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove’s reforms in 2010-14, which made the school curriculum more demanding, gave extra power to teachers and encouraged academy schools beyond local government control.
但工党在教师工会中的盟友从一开始就反对这些改革，将戈夫视为撒旦的化身。自2024年重新掌权以来，他的工党继任教育大臣们竭尽全力拆解其改革成果，包括降低考试的作用、削弱校长的独立性以及淡化竞争。政府还通过强制私立学校缴纳英国增值税，限制了家长的选择权。很难想象还有比这更“毫不妥协”和“持续不断”的做法了。
But Labour’s allies in the teaching unions fought these reforms from the first, treating Gove as spawn of Satan. Since regaining power in 2024, his Labour successors as education ministers have done their best to dismantle his reforms by downgrading the role of exams, making headteachers less independent and de-emphasizing competition. The government has also restricted parents’ choices by forcing independent schools to pay the UK sales tax. It is hard to be more “implacable” and “incessant” than that.
伯纳姆对激进言论的偏好如何与工党本质上的保守主义相契合？他提出了三个重大构想：取消一项针对国家养老金的荒谬且昂贵的财务保护措施；建立一个社会护理国家服务体系；以及改革英国的简单多数选举制度。他难道不是一个改革者吗？
How does Burnham’s taste for radical rhetoric fit with Labour’s essential conservatism? He has advanced three big ideas: removing an absurd and expensive financial protection for state pensions; creating a national service for social care; and revamping Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Surely he is a reformer?
未必。伯纳姆是保守党最珍视的艺术——转移注意力——的大师。他的养老金改革看起来很勇敢，但计划是在下届选举之后才实施。选举改革是一个不错的想法，但其紧迫性远不及英国在移民和经济生产力方面的失败，而后者在首相那里获得的关注度却少得多。建立国家护理服务体系将极大地增加国家的作用，从而巩固现状。
Not necessarily. Burnham is a master of the most precious Conservative art: distraction. His pension reforms look brave, but they’re penciled in for after the next election. Electoral reform is a nice idea, though hardly less pressing than the UK’s failures on immigration and economic productivity, which have had far less prime ministerial airtime. A National Care Service will increase the role of the state hugely, entrenching the status quo.
伯纳姆在怀旧方面也比现在的保守党做得更好。这位“北方之王”在谈到新自由主义带来衰落之前工业北方的辉煌时，总是热泪盈眶：廉价的公屋、稳定的工作、备受珍视的足球队以及集体团结。当然，他对那些失去的制造业腹地的描述，并不比任何保守党对郡县的赞美诗更准确。但他的空想确实吸引了那些在新自由主义的向上流动梦想中长大，却只得到了社会原子化的人们。
Burnham also does nostalgia better than the present Tories. The “King of the North” gets misty eyed when talking about the glories of the industrial north before neoliberalism brought the Fall: cheap council houses, secure jobs, cherished football teams and collective solidarity. He is, of course, no more accurate about the lost manufacturing heartlands than any Conservative paean to the shires. But his pipedreams do appeal to people raised on the neoliberal dream of upward mobility, and who got only social atomization.
如果保守党在传递冷酷无情这一接力棒的同时，能够接过工党作为充满新点子、社会正义和温和改革政党的衣钵，那将是一件富有诗意的事情。凯米·巴德诺赫那篇关于“正确道路”的3万字文章，确实探讨了伯纳姆不明智地忽略的两个主题：改善经济增长和移民融合。
It would be poetic if the Conservative Party — while handing on the baton for ruthlessness — was seizing Labour’s mantle as the party of bright ideas, social justice and gentle reform. Kemi Badenoch’s 30,000-word essay on “The Right Way” does address two subjects that Burnham unwisely ignores: improving economic growth and migrant integration.
遗憾的是，她的政党被其养老金领取者支持群体所困，又深受英国脱欧阴影的笼罩，无法成为务实改革的先驱。随着借贷成本进入危险区域，一场潜在的经济崩溃可能会让英国政治变得面目全非。与此同时，伯纳姆式的国家主义保守主义似乎注定要长期占据主导地位。
Unfortunately, her party is too trapped by their pensioner support, and too haunted by Brexit, to be the herald of pragmatic reform. A potential economic smash, as borrowing costs move into dangerous territory, might scramble British politics beyond recognition. In the meantime, Burnham’s brand of statist conservativism looks set for a long reign.