約翰哈日：克萊格 - 那出賣我們所有人的男人
Johann Hari： Clegg – the man who betrayed us all
Clegg 2.0 promised to protect the poor. Clegg 3.0 throws the poor out of their homes and makes it harder for them to go to university
克萊格 2.0承諾保護窮人，克萊格 3.0拋窮人出他們的家，並使他們更難上大學
Friday, 12 November 2010
Translation by Autumnson Blog
Two months before the general election, Nick Clegg warned there would be "riots" on the streets if the Conservatives introduced extreme cuts. Now they have begun – and Clegg himself is the chief cutter.
大選前的兩個月，克萊格警告街頭將有“暴動”，如果保守黨引入極端的削減。現在他們已經開始 - 和克萊格他自己是主力削減者。
There was a whiplash moment this Wednesday. Inside the House of Commons, a pale-faced and barely coherent Clegg was championing the trebling of tuition fees at Prime Minister’s Question Time, despite the fact he promised before the election to “implacably oppose” this move because it would be “a disaster”. Then, in a low rumble, the chants of the 50,000 betrayed students massed outside began to echo into the chamber. He began to stumble: “We have stuck to our ambition? our wider ambition?” (Laughter, jeers). “Our policy is more progressive?” (Hoots from all sides, including his own.) “The truth is before the election we didn’t know...” The chants got louder, and the excuses got more contorted.
Clegg is one of the great mysteries of British politics. Before the election, he told us “there isn't a serious economist in the world who agrees with the Conservatives... [that] we should pull the rug out from under the economy with immediate spending cuts.” Now he is one of the leading champions of doing exactly that. In just a few days after the election, he cleared a space in his swanky new ministerial offices and staged a bonfire of his principles.
克萊格是英國政壇其中一個大謎，在大選前，他告訴我們：“世界上沒有一個認真的經濟學家會同意保守黨 ... [即]我們應該將經濟體下的小地毯拉出，以即時的支出削減。"現在他是其中一個領先的冠軍做恰恰如此的那事。在大選短短數天之後，他在他的時髦新部長辦公室騰出一空間，和上演一場他的原則的營火。
Whatever you think of these policies, how can anybody defend gathering the votes of millions of people on a clear mandate of opposing these Tory proposals, and then – as soon as the door of his ministerial limo swings open – championing each one of them? Remember: David Cameron got 36 per cent of the vote in Britain, and even that was on a promise that “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts.” Some 60 per cent of us voted for parties to his left. We could see the Britain he wanted to build – just this week, Great Ormond Street Hospital discovered it is facing a 20 per cent cut in its budget – and we rejected it decisively. You can agree or disagree with the swinging of this scythe, but nobody can claim it is democratic.
Clegg may well be committing political suicide. He represents Sheffield Hallam, the only seat in South Yorkshire not held by Labour. It has a huge population of students and workers at Sheffield Forgemasters – which his government has effectively bankrupted. It is now probable he will lose his seat. Nationally, more than half of his party’s supporters say he has “sold out”. They are skidding down the slaughterhouse tube of the Australian Democrats, a long-standing centre-left party who installed a right-wing government in power and were promptly euthanized by the electorate.
Clegg 2.0 promised he would “prioritize the interests of the poor.” Clegg 3.0 is throwing the poor out of their homes and making it harder for them to go to university. I was the first person in my family to stay on in education beyond the age of 16. Would I have had the confidence to go to Cambridge if I had known I’d be racking up more than £36,000 in fees and loans? Would I have felt internally pressured to choose a much cheaper university, and lesser chances in life?
It was predictable that the British people would be furious at this betrayal and fight back. A tiny number fought back this week in a despicable way: throwing fire extinguishers off a tall building could kill somebody, and whatever thug did it should go to prison. But most acted eloquently and passionately and peacefully. “Don’t ruin my dreams,” one student’s banner said, summarizing the mood of the crowd.
There was a string of ironies in the reactions of senior Conservatives to the protest. Cameron complained that there were not enough police at the protest – but he is in the process of dramatically cutting police numbers, so soon there won’t be enough police for any of us. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor, angrily condemned student violence – hoping we have forgotten that when he was a student, he and the Prime Minister were part of a gang of aristocrats called the Bullingdon Club, some of whom charged around Oxford smashing windows and intimidating people in a remarkably similar way to the anarchists at Milbank Tower.
But here’s the biggest irony. When they wanted to sell these extreme cuts, the Conservative and Liberal Democrats would turn moist-eyed and say it was “immoral” to “burden the next generation with higher debts.” So as a solution they have introduced a program that will? burden the next generation with much higher debts.
When all this is spelled out and the excuses stripped away, Clegg and his defenders have one last argument. There Is No Alternative. We Have To Do It. In a recession, you must cut. Tighten your belt! Family budget! Just rejoice! This U-Turner Is Not For Turning! It’s especially strange to hear Liberals say this, since it was the greatest Liberal of the twentieth century – John Maynard Keynes – was explained definitively why this thinking is wrong and in fact caused the Great Depression of the 1930s. The reason why we need national deficits it precisely to revive demand when private consumption implodes. Like the Ghost of Christmas Future, our neighbour Ireland is collapsing deeper and harder into depression – and they are just two pages ahead of us on the Cleggeron script. (“Look and learn from across the Irish Sea,” George Osborne lectured us. Yes, we should George.)
The truth is that since 1750, our national debt has always been higher than it is now, except for two 40-year gaps. If we are “bust” now, we have almost always been bust. The debt was more than twice this level in 1945, and we still built the NHS and secured decades of prosperity. It is flatly untrue to say the bond markets will downgrade our debt if we don’t cut: they just downgraded Ireland precisely because it did cut in this way and killed its economy. If Clegg believes massive cuts are “necessary” and “the only way”, then he is a willing dupe.
There are plenty of alternatives, and he knows it. Instead of soaring tuition fees, they could introduce a graduate tax – as, to be fair to him, Vince Cable argued for, only for Clegg and Cameron to rebuff him. They know it would dissuade far fewer students.
And there is a win-win alternative to the government’s ugliest policy – kicking huge numbers of the poorest people out of their homes by slashing housing benefit. (Oddly, I was the only journalist before the election who warned this would happen. David Cameron called it “black propaganda”, and snapped at a single mum who tried to challenge him about it at a public meeting that she should “run for office yourself” if she was so bothered.) Spare me the claims that Iain Duncan Smith, who lives in a million-pound mansion inherited by his wife’s aristocratic family, is “kind” and his reforms are “well-intentioned”: triggering an exodus of poor people from their friends and schools and neighbourhoods in our great cities and forcing them to live in concrete blocks of poverty far beyond is so unkind even Boris Johnson hyperbolically calls it “Kosovo-style social cleansing.”
The reason why we have so many poor people piling up in private rented accommodation – which is expensive – is that, for a generation now, we have been whittling down our stock of council housing, under the Tories and New Labour. They were sold off, which was a good policy because it expanded home ownership. But instead of investing the proceeds in building more council homes, they were frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy. It caused a drought in social housing, so the only humane option in the short-term was to pay rent for people. The real alternative is to begin a massive program of building social housing.
This has a double-benefit. House building employs a large number of people on low or average incomes, who then spend the money they earn quickly on other goods and services. Economists call it a “multiplier effect”, spurring economic growth. It’s one of the best economic stimulators we have. But instead, the ConDem coalition has decided to cut house building to its lowest level in generations and stage mass evictions.
Nick, you should remember that angry chant you heard echoing into the House of Commons this week as you stammered and yammered. It’s the sound of the rioters you prophesied would come with Cameron’s cuts. Whatever happened to that Nick Clegg?
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-clegg-ndash-the-man-who-betrayed-us-all-2131652.html
克萊格：我們對以色列錯了
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