The nanny state
保姆式国家
What an experiment in state-sponsored parenting says about British politics
一项关于政府资助管理的实验如是评价英国政治
JACKIE BAPTISTE’S working day begins at seven o’clock, when she goes to a council house, drags someone else’s children out of bed and packs them off【1】 to school. The social worker is not a woman to be trifled with【2】. “They might tell me to F-off【3】, but it’s only words,” she shrugs. Sometimes she films the desperate attempts of a mother to control her brood, then plays the recording back, offering tips on how to do it right. She attends parent-teacher meetings, appointments with doctors and counselling for alcoholism and domestic violence, all the while【4】 holding the hands of her adult charges. In a typical week she will see the same family five or six times, as part of Westminster council’s Family Recovery Programme. She is part of a growing movement, and the product of a remarkable political consensus.
早晨七点，杰姬.巴蒂斯特开始了她一天的工作，她来到了一间民宅，把别人家的孩子从床上拽起来，打发他们去上学。她作为一个社会服务人员，并非能受人随意指使。“他们有时对我说快滚，但是也仅仅说说而已。”她说着耸了耸肩。有时，她看到一位妈妈设法让孩子们安静下来而筋疲力尽，并且将这一幕录制下来，之后一边回放视频，一边为这些妈妈传授遇到这种情况的如何应对。她参加家长会，帮忙预约医生，为酗酒和家庭暴力提供咨询，一直以来，她都与这些需要照顾的成年人共同努力。作为威斯敏斯特理事会家庭恢复计划的一部分，巴蒂斯特一周典型的工作就是会去同一家需要照料的家庭五次到六次。她是这项蓬勃发展运动的一分子，也是非凡的政治共识的产物。
The state has long meddled with poor families. In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin recalls that on entering a London workhouse【5】, he and his brother Sydney were sent off to the children’s wing while his mother went to the women’s wing, a separation that had been routine since the Poor Law of 1834. There were still several thousand children living in such places when the last ones were abolished in the 1940s and Britain began building a comprehensive welfare state. In the decades since, the government has acquired many more children, though it houses them differently. There are currently 66,000 children in care, meaning they have been removed (voluntarily or otherwise) from their biological parents. The majority are shuffled between short-term placements with foster families.
这个国家总是掺和穷困家庭的生活。查理.卓别林在其自传中回忆道，进入一家伦敦的济贫院，他和弟弟西德尼被送往儿童区，而他的妈妈被送往妇女区,这种日常的分离是由1834年颁布的新济贫法规定的。最后一部济贫法废除时，仍有几千个孩子住在这样的地方，从那之后英国便开始建立一个拥有完善福利的国家。十年间，政府已经收容了许许多多的孩子，尽管为他们提供的生活环境不尽相同。目前，有66万儿童受到照顾，这意味着他们已经与亲生父母解除关系（自愿或是被迫的）。大多数儿童往往在临时安置处和寄养家庭之间来回穿梭。
This is where the new scheme comes in. For although taking children from their parents may sometimes be the least bad thing to do, the government is, in aggregate【6】, a deadbeat, feckless parent. Children who have been in care are 50 times more likely to go to prison than those who have not, according to calculations by Policy Exchange, a think-tank. They are also 66 times more likely to see their own children taken into care. This is not for lack of money: the average bill for taking a child under the state’s wing is £38,000 ($61,400) per year. Better, then, to employ a latter-day Mary Poppins 【7】to nanny a family into staying together.
这也是新计划实行的原因。虽然政府有时把儿童从那些游手好闲，不负责任的父母身边带走，但是这一做法也并非最坏的事情。据一个名为“政策交流”的智囊统计，在教养院生活的儿童入狱的可能性是其他儿童的50倍。这些儿童为人父母后，自己的孩子被送入教养院的几率是常人的66倍。这并不是缺钱所致：因为在英国福利社会中，养一个孩子每年平均只要3万8千英镑（折合6万1千4百美元）。更加理想的是雇佣一个当代的玛丽. 波平斯，促使一家人其乐融融。
Parents who are at risk of losing their children, their liberty and their housing can choose to enroll in Westminster’s programme. Most of those eligible have decided to do so. “We say: ‘Those people over there want to take your house and your child away. We want to work with you to make sure that does not happen’,” explains Natasha Bishopp, who is in charge of the scheme. Each family signs a contract. If its terms are broken, the council does what it would have done anyway. So far that has happened to just 15% of the 210 contracts signed since 2008.
那些有可能失去孩子，自由和住所的父母，他们可以选择加入威斯敏斯特项目。大部分符合条件的家庭也决定这样做。“我们说：‘那些人想要把你的房子和孩子都夺走。我们希望与你合作让这一切都不会发生，’”负责这个计划的娜塔莎.毕晓普如是解释说。每个家庭都会签署一份合同。如果违反条例，无论如何，理事会也会按原计划执行。从2008年目前为止，在已经签署的210份合同中，其中仅有15%出现了这种情况。
Part of the reason for this success, Ms Bishopp argues, is that people who are constantly pestered by the government’s agencies tend to experience its sanctions either as empty threats or as sudden and mystifying. The contract helps overcome that, as does embodying the state in the form of a single, smiling individual. Gail Porter, who runs similar schemes for Lancashire Council, reports one of the families her team works with had previously received visits from 21 separate agencies. The results of these programmes and others like them have encouraged the government to launch a national Troubled Families Programme. Central government will provide £4,000 per family and local authorities a further £6,000 in the hope of improving the lives of 120,000 families between now and 2015.
毕晓普女士认为，这项计划进行顺利的原因之一是由于那些饱受政府机构长期困扰的人们，可能收到过口头警告，或是突然受到不明原因的处罚。这份合同以独立，阳光的个体形式展现了国家的具体形象，并且有助于克服上述情况的发生。同样，盖尔.波特也为兰开夏郡理事会经营类似的方案，他在报告中称，他所在小组帮助的一户家庭，之前曾受到21家不同机构的访问。这些方案以及其他类似方案获得的成果鼓励政府开展一项全国困难家庭计划。从现在至2015年期间，为了改善12万家庭的生活状况，中央政府将为每户家庭提供4000英镑，为地方政府增加拨款6000英镑。
This points to an interesting convergence【8】 in British politics. For all that Labour likes to paint the Tories as a heartless bunch intent on slashing welfare and the Conservatives retort that Labour would trap the poor on state benefits for ever—lines of argument that were on display throughout this year’s party conferences—the two parties have come to startlingly similar conclusions on how to help the poorest and most dysfunctional families【9】.
在这一点上，英国两大政党意见不谋而合，这一现象十分有趣。工党总是将托利党（也称为保守党）描述为冷血的群体，都是在于其坚持大幅度削减福利，然而保守党反驳认为工党会使穷人永远依赖于政府的福利—这一论点在今年的两党的会谈中都贯穿始终—最后，两个党派出人意料的在关于如何帮助赤贫家庭和不健全家庭得出相似结论。
The culture pause
文化停顿
British policy wonks【10】 go through cycles of treating poor people as an income problem and as a culture problem. At the moment they are in a culture phase. This is mainly because the income thesis, which had the upper hand【11】 for most of the past few decades, was tested and found inadequate under the previous government. A huge expansion of tax credits did not do much for what Charles Booth【12】 called the “submerged tenth” of society. Besides, under the relative-income measure of child poverty that the previous government judged itself on, the number of poor children in Britain has gone down since the financial crisis, which cut median incomes. Arrange for a Lehman Brothers【13】 to fail every year and the problem would be solved.
英国政策专家曾经一度都将穷人视为引起收入和文化问题的原因，如今他们跳出了这个循环。此刻，他们处在一个文化的阶段。这主要是因为，过去几十年大多数时间里，比起文化，收入话题始终占上风，但上届政府对这一主题的评定和发现还不够充分。税收减免的大幅度增长并没有对查尔斯•布茨所说的“水深火热的十分之一”起到多少作用。此外，根据针对贫困儿童的相关收入评估，上届政府认为，金融危机以来，中位收入减少，而英国贫困儿童的数量持续下降。每年安置雷曼兄弟公司的计划总是以失败收尾，而问题将会得到解决。
By the end of its tenure, Labour had decided that culture mattered more. The results of Sure Start【14】, a network of optional parenting classes created under Labour, were and still are disappointing. Tony Blair’s government began to experiment with family-intervention projects. Gordon Brown was keen on them too, visiting one in Dundee【15】 before he became prime minister. Louise Casey, a civil servant who ran this effort for Mr Blair, is in charge of the present scheme. Labour seems reluctant to attack an approach it pushed when in government.
直到任期结束，工党都一直将文化视为事关紧要的问题。工党建立的一项称为“确保开端”计划，即可供选择的亲子班网络体系，效果仍差强人意。托利政府开始试行多个家庭干涉计划。戈登.布朗也对这些计划感兴趣，在他成为首相之前，他就曾造访在敦提的一个相关项目。路易斯.凯西，是一个公务员，曾为布莱尔展开这方面工作，现在负责目前这一计划。工党当政期间，似乎不情愿抨击其自身提出的方法。
For Conservatives, the promise of keeping families together trumps traditional concerns about an interfering state. Tories also like the programme’s focus on teaching people how to take responsibility for their own lives, and its promise of saving money in the long term. The party that rails against the nanny state has come to embrace state nannying. Ms Baptiste thus enjoys cross-party support for her afternoon task: taking a pair of Marigold gloves from her bottomless bag and helping one of her families to tidy up its messy flat.
保守党促进家庭和睦的承诺，比传统意义上担心过多干涉更为重要。保守党也钟情这样的计划：集中于教会人们如何对他们的生活承担责任，以及长期节约支出的承诺。作为曾经反对保姆式管理国家的托利党，如今也开始欣然接受国家过多管理的方式。巴蒂斯特女士很享受两党对她午后的工作的大力支持：她从深不见底的手袋中拿出一双万寿菊手套（英国的一个手套品牌），帮助她负责的一户人家收拾杂乱的屋子。
注解：
【1】 Pack off: 匆匆把…打发走；匆匆送走
【2】 trifled with:轻率(或嘲笑)地对待(某人或某事物)；轻视；玩弄：心不在焉地做；摆弄；耍弄：视同儿戏；不认真对待
【3】 f-off：1.short for fuck off
2.used online when words are censored
【4】 all the while:一直，始终
【5】 workhouse：济贫院又称救济院、救贫院、贫民院，是为穷人提供工作和弱者提供生计的机构，起源于《伊丽莎白济贫法》（Elizabethan Poor Law）。济贫院在英国和爱尔兰得到高度发展，在其他欧洲国家也有小规模的济贫院，如荷兰在全国范围只有三间大的济贫院[2]，而1777年单英国柴郡就有31间。Poor Law1834年议会通过《济贫法（修正案）》，这是1601年以后最重要的济贫法，史称新济贫法。该法取消“斯皮纳姆兰制”的家内救济，改为受救济者必须是被收容在习艺所中从事苦役的贫民。所内的生活条件极为恶劣，劳动极其繁重，贫民望而却步，被称之为劳动者的“巴士底狱”。
【6】 in aggregate：总体来说
【7】 玛丽．波平斯阿姨是特拉弗斯写的六本以玛丽．波平斯阿姨为主角的童话中的主人公，她是一位褓姆仙女，，她来到人间帮助班克斯家的两位小朋友重拾欢乐，教导他们如何克服生活的困难，并且让终日汲汲于银行业务与女权运动的班克斯两夫妇体认到亲子温情的可贵。
【8】 convergence：The convergence of different ideas, groups, or societies is the process by which they stop being different and become more similar. 趋同性
【9】 dysfunctional families：不健全家庭
【10】 policy wonks：政策专家
【11】 had the upper hand：占上风，占优势
【12】 Charles Booth：商人查尔斯•布茨(Charles Booth)对1885年有人宣称的“四分之一伦敦人都生活在极端贫困中”这个观点表示怀疑，于是他雇人进行调查。调查结果显示为30%。随后这个调查结果就被以7种颜色表现形式绘制成了地图，从黑线的“最底层”到金线的富裕阶层。当局看到这张地图后惊呆了，随后第一批简易住宅建成。
【13】 Lehman Brothers：雷曼兄弟公司：雷曼兄弟公司自1850年创立以来，已在全球范围内建立起了创造新颖产品、探索最新融资方式、提供最佳优质服务的良好声誉。全球性多元化的投资银行，《商业周刊》评出的2000年最佳投资银行，整体调研实力高居《机构投资者》排名榜首，《国际融资评论》授予的2002年度最佳投行。北京时间2008年9月15日，在次级抵押贷款市场（次贷危机）危机加剧的形势下，美国第四大投行雷曼兄弟最终丢盔弃甲，宣布申请破产保护。
【14】 sure start：英国的确保开端(sure start)就是一个大家比较熟悉的“以家庭”为服务对象的早期教养项目。
【15】 Dundee：敦提（英国苏格兰东部港口城市）
经济学家
2012-10-24
经济学家
687次
点赞(0)
收藏
登录
