BEC阅读：撒切尔夫人的领导力

　　Leaders who change things need conviction, courage and luck. Margaret Thatcher had all three in abundance. By the time she was ousted by her own party in 1990, the Iron Lady’s head had been turned by her 11 years in 10 Downing Street. She had become, as one of her cabinet ministers said to me at the time, slightly mad. She had certainly changed things.

　　推行变革的领导人需要信念、勇气和好运。玛格丽特 撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)不乏这三样东西。等到1990年她被自己的政党扫地出门时，11年的首相生涯已经改变了“铁娘子”的头脑。正如她手下的一位内阁大臣当时对我所说的，她已经变得有点疯了。她肯定改变了局面。

　　The cliché about Mrs Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher, as she was later known, never really suited her) is that she altered the way Britons thought about themselves and the way the world thought about Britain. Along the way, the state made way for the individual. That is about right. Many admire her still for her guts and grit – qualities that seem lost to the present generation of politicians; many, particularly in the old industrial heartlands of northern England and Scotland, revile her for the wholesale destruction of their communities.

　　人们常说，撒切尔夫人(后被封为撒切尔女男爵，但这一称号一直与她不相称)执政期间改变了英国人看待自身的方式，也改变了世界看待英国的方式。与此同时，她推动实现了“国退民进”。这样说基本上是对的。许多人仍然钦佩她的勇气和刚毅，当今这一代政界人士似乎已经丧失了这些品质;许多人，尤其是英格兰北部和苏格兰传统工业腹地的人们，则痛骂她将他们的社区摧毁殆尽。

　　She was not the most successful Conservative prime minister of the 20th century – for the simple reason that this daughter of a shopkeeper was not really a Tory. More a radical really – even perhaps a Maoist. A disdain for ideology had once seen the Conservatives labelled the stupid party. Mrs Thatcher was nothing if not an ideologue. Nostalgic as she was for an earlier age of British greatness, she was no respecter of tradition or established institutions. Many post-Thatcherite Conservative MPs show the same restless disregard for their party’s communitarian tradition. David Cameron’s Big Society has flopped. It may yet turn out that one of her legacies will be the destruction of Burkean Toryism.

　　撒切尔夫人不是20世纪最成功的保守党首相，原因很简单：这位店主的女儿并非名副其实的保守党成员。她其实更像个激进份子，甚至是毛主义者。保守党在传统上鄙视意识形态，这一度使该党被贴上“愚蠢的政党”的标签。撒切尔则抱有坚定的意识形态。尽管她怀念昔日英国的伟大，但她不把传统或既有体制放在眼里。与她一样，撒切尔时代之后的许多保守派议员也对该党的社群主义传统表现出厌烦与不屑。现任首相戴维 卡梅伦(David Cameron)的“大社会”(Big Society)努力已经失败，而事实可能证明，摧毁伯克派(Burkean)保守主义是撒切尔的政治遗产之一。

　　Her accomplishments – rolling back the postwar British state, clipping more than the wings of an over-mighty trade union movement, replacing direction from Whitehall with liberal markets – would have seemed greater had the obituaries been written before the great financial crash of 2008. After decades of relative decline Britain was slipping into the deeper abyss of absolute decline. It needed something akin to the Thatcher revolution.

　　逆转战后英国的“大政府”趋势，重挫过于强大的工会运动，用自由市场取代政府指导——若是讣告在2008年金融危机之前写成，她的功绩本将看起来伟大得多。在她上任之初，英国在经历数十年的相对衰落之后，正陷入绝对意义上的下滑，情况危急，正需要撒切尔革命那样的改革。