最古老的难题（双语）

EPOCHS and -isms are usually named after monarchs, prime ministers and the occasional chancellor of the exchequer, not home secretaries from fag-end governments. Yet in May 1993 the Age of Howard began. Until then, newly appointed home secretaries had nodded along during their department’s induction ritual. Mandarins, brandishing charts showing crime rising since the 1960s, would counsel their new master against futile, costly quests to reverse this apparently inescapable fact of modernity.

大时代和某种主义通常依据君王，首相，偶尔也可能是财政大臣来命名，而不是那些供职于日薄西山的政府的内政大臣。但是在1993年的五月，霍华德时代开启了。此前，新任命的内政大臣会通常在其部门的就任仪式上频频点头示意。迂腐而故作清高的官吏，挥舞着显示20世纪60年代以来节节攀升的犯罪率的图表，向他们的新主子献言进策。尽管徒劳无功，代价沉重，他们仍力图扭转现代化这无法抗拒的事实。

Michael Howard ignored them. The last home secretary in John Major’s Conservative government built prisons, toughened sentences and curbed freedoms. For liberals, he remains an ogre, while the right credits him with a fall in crime that broadly continues to this day. What they agree on is that he made the weather. In criminal justice, counter-terrorism and anything else that pits liberty against security, a decade and a half of toughness was inaugurated. A job once held by patricians went to a string of Howard lookalikes under Labour.

迈克尔霍华德对他们不屑一顾。作为梅杰保守党政府的最后一任内政大臣，他大兴土木，建造新的监狱，同时铁腕强化现有刑罚，禁锢自由。对于自由主义分子而言，他不啻于恶煞。而右派分子则对其赞誉有加，称其降低了犯罪率，福泽至今。但是两派人都承认：他是一个叱咤风云的人物。在司法公正，反恐以及其他一些自由与安全对立的领域，他开启了15年之久的铁腕政策。在工党的统治下，这一曾经由贵族掌控的职位落入了霍华德之流的手中。

Now it seems the Age of Howard is fading. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are fleshing out the civil libertarianism they promised in opposition. Labour’s planned ID cards are done for. David Cameron, the prime minister, wants to shrink the DNA database. Ministers have suggested replacing short sentences with community punishments. This week Theresa May, the home secretary, announced a review of counter-terrorist measures.

时至今日，似乎霍华德时代正悄然褪去。保守党人和自由民主党人正逐步兑现在野时期做出的承诺：公民自由主义。工党身份证计划宣告结束。首相大卫卡梅隆希望缩减DNA数据库。大臣们建议短期徒刑改为社区义务劳动。本周，内政大臣特里萨梅宣布重新审议之前的反恐措施。

Many of the coalition’s liberals—including Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister—have thought seriously about their creed. Excitable depictions of Britain as a “police state” are generally avoided. They are eager to suggest alternatives to policies they regard as draconian, rather than merely opposing them outright. And they are intellectually honest, at least in private, about the trade-off between public safety and freedom. Civil-liberties campaigners have sometimes undermined their cause by denying that it entails any loss of security.

许多执政联盟内部的自由主义分子，包括副首相尼克克莱格，将自己的信条奉为圭臬。通常对于将英国热切地描述为“极权国度”的行为，他们避犹不及。他们认为警察过于残暴，因此急切地出谋划策，寻求他法来取代警察，而不是简单地将警察完全排斥在外。对于公众安全和自由之间的取舍关系，他们也不避讳，至少自己心知肚明。民权运动分子的事业之所以有时会受阻，就是因为他们否认追求自由意味着损害安全。

But the hazards of liberalism are political as well as physical. Even those voters who resent health-and-safetyism and other yokes of the nanny state have never been taken by civil liberties in general. Mr Clegg’s surge in the polls during this year’s general-election campaign collapsed once light was shone on his home-affairs policies.

但是自由主义的危险既存于现实生活，也扎根于政治之中。即便是那些憎恨保姆国家“健康安全至上”教条和其他束缚的选民，民权分子也从没将他们纳入自己的阵营。在今年的大选中，公布其内政事务方针后，克莱格飙升的支持率旋即土崩瓦解。

The coalition is already vulnerable to charges of otherworldliness, what with its largely rich and southern power-base and the blue-blooded duo of Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg fronting it. The latter’s preoccupation with voting reform and constitutional tinkering during a time of fiscal crisis risks adding to that impression. A crusade for civil liberties may do the same. It is not hard to imagine the government looking out of touch next to an earthier Labour opposition.

目前，执政联盟已经遭受“不切实际”的指责，岌岌可危。究其原因，乃是因为执政联盟的权力根基主要为南部富裕阶层，而卡梅隆和克莱格又恰是“贵族二人组”。正处金融危机时期，克莱格却对于投票制度的改革和宪法的修订孜孜以求，这将进一步加深人们这一印象。而对于民权的抗争也会招致同样后果。不难想象，接下来，当权政府将与相对务实的反对派工党更加格格不入。

Some also suspect that the coalition’s liberalism will begin to jar with some in its own ranks. Liberty versus security is a question that divides not merely the elites from the electorate, and the government from the opposition. The fault-line also runs between Conservatives and other Conservatives, and between the Tories as a whole and the Liberal Democrats. Not even fiscal austerity is as divisive; most Tories are fully behind that. An exclusively Conservative government would have had a hard enough time pleasing its doves, such as Dominic Grieve and Ken Clarke, without alarming its hawks, such as Liam Fox and Michael Gove. A two-party coalition will find it all the more difficult.

还有人怀疑执政联盟的自由主义也开始招致集团内部某些成员的不满。自由与安全的对立不仅将精英分子和大众选民划分开来，也使得政府和反对派泾渭分明。这一分水岭也存在于保守党人之间，以及保守党作为一个整体和自由民主党之间。各党派在财政削减问题上都未有如此之分歧。大多数保守党人全力支持财政削减政策。若是保守党一党组阁，尚且可能获得足够时机，竭力去安抚其鸽派，例如Dominic Grieve和 Ken Clarke，同时不惊动其鹰派，例如Liam Fox 和 Michael Gove。而两党联合执政将使得这一切难上加难。

On liberty and mattresses

But Labour itself cannot evade the dilemma. Indeed, it is even more confounding for the party, given the nature and breadth of its traditional support. “Woolly minded Hampstead liberals”—as Jack Straw, one of Labour’s most Howardist home secretaries, once described them—are certainly a constituency that Labour has struggled to hang on to. But so is the white working-class. Designing a home-affairs policy that enthuses both these tribes seems impossible.

论自由与床垫

但是工党也不能免于此等困境。的确，对于工党而言，鉴于其传统支持阵营的范围和本质，这一困境更为棘手。”思维混乱的汉普斯特（英国北部一地区，该地区聚集了大批自由主义的作家和诗人：译者注）式的自由分子”——正如工党最为霍华德式的内政大臣Jack Straw所描述的——毫无疑问是工党竭力争取的选民。白人工人阶级也是如此。要想制定出融合这些观点相左的群体无异于异想天开。

The tension is on display in the party’s leadership election, which concludes in September. One of the candidates, Ed Miliband, wants Labour to woo Lib Dems by championing civil liberties. More hawkish hopefuls, such as Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, take the New Labour view of crime as a menace to social justice. It is the poor who are hounded by the kind of anti-social behaviour easily described as “low-level” by those who have never known life on a housing estate.

这种紧张的态势早在九月结束的工党领导权之争当中便已显现出来。候选人之一Ed Miliband希望工党通过倡导民权来吸引自由民主党人。而更为激进的候选人例如Ed Balls 和 Andy Burnham， 则认为“新工党“对待犯罪的态度乃是对社会公正的威胁。事实上，经常困扰穷人正是那些“仇视社会”行为，即被那些从未经历平民生活的人轻易地描述为“下等”的行为。

Labour’s quandary is also captured by the great mattress parable invoked by Jon Cruddas, a cerebral Labour backbencher with a feel for the rougher edges of politics. On his rounds in Dagenham, the deprived eastern outpost of London that he represents in Parliament, Mr Cruddas met an 86-year-old woman living a blameless life. Asked about her concerns, she pointed to an ugly old mattress lying abandoned in the garden opposite.

Jon Cruddas巧妙的床垫比喻也道出了工党所处的困境。Jon Cruddas是一位理智的普通工党议员，亲身感受到了政治那“粗糙的棱角”。在议会中，Jon Cruddas所代表的是伦敦东区前沿贫穷的的Dagenham区。Cruddas先生在该地巡视中碰到一位安分守己的86岁高龄的妇女。当问到她目前的担忧时，她指了指躺在对面花园里的一块又老又丑，废弃不用的床垫。更多信息请访问：http://www.24en.com/

It was on private property, so a strict liberal would struggle to object. But for her, it was a daily eyesore and an invitation to further loutishness—an Essex version of the “broken windows” of Brooklyn lore. There are countless other examples (“whether you can walk around with a can of Special Brew, how people look after their dogs”) of this tension between freedom and security. These are not just theoretical conundrums; they play themselves out on the gritty streets of Labour’s heartlands.
这个床垫属于私人财产，因此严格的自由主义者会竭力反对。但是对于这位老妪而言，床垫每天都是她的“眼中钉”，总会引起她的不快——这相当于ESSEX郡布鲁克林民间故事中的“碎玻璃”的翻版。关于这种自由与安全的剑拔弩张，还有其他无数类似的例子（是否人们有权拿着一罐Special Brew酒四处溜达，人们应该怎样照看自己的狗）。这些不仅是存在于理论中的难题。它们俨然每天在工党的核心地区，在那里的街道上上演开来。

Given the richer, quieter nature of their own heartlands, the choice between liberty and security is perhaps a bit less agonising for Tories and Lib Dems. Even before their planned roll-back of the night-watchman state, both parties had more of a liberal tradition than Labour. They don’t, after all, have to reconcile Hampstead with Dagenham.
在保守党和自民党的核心选区，选民相对更为富有，祥和，因此对于这两党而言，在自由和安全之间做出取舍可能较为轻松。毕竟，他们不需要在Hampstead 和Dagenham之间寻求折中。