IT IS only 40 minutes from Tilbury to
Fenchurch Street station, on the edge of the City. But most residents of the
town, one of England's poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital
as fly to the moon. “It's all offices there,” said Vicky, a 32-year-old carer
for the mentally ill. “For people like us, it's a bit daunting. You sort of
think everyone's more intellectual than you.”
蒂尔伯里镇是英格兰最贫穷的地方之一。从这里到伦敦城边上的
Fenchurch Street
车站只需
40
分钟。但是，镇上的大多数居民可能会把去首都上班看成是月球之旅。“那里到处都是办公楼，”
32
岁的精神病护理人员维琪说。“对我们来说，伦敦让人紧张。想想看，随便在那里找个人出来，都比我们墨水多。”
Asked what her school grades were, Vicky
says she “wouldn't know, to be honest.” Education is not something the
working-class people of Tilbury have traditionally gone for. You didn't need
O-levels to heave sacks of malt and bales of tea in Tilbury Docks, an outpost
of the Port of London in the Thames estuary which was, until the 1980s, the
biggest employer. The dockers' wives were too busy raising children to have a
career. Then came shipping containers and dock mechanisation. By the mid-1980s
almost a fifth of the town's men were on the dole, sending Tilbury into a
downward spiral from which it has yet to emerge.
说到她自己的学习成绩时，维琪说，“说实话，”她“没脸说”。教育不是蒂尔伯里的劳动阶层的传统追求。作为伦敦港务局的一个下属单位，位于泰晤士河河口的蒂尔伯里码头在上世纪
80
年代前一直都是当地人的最大雇主，在这里卖力气扛麻包是不需要中学毕业证书的。那时，码头工人的妻子们都在忙着抚养孩子，根本不用去工作。后来，船运集装箱和码头机械作业出现了。到上世纪
80
年代中期，镇上几乎五分之一的男人都在依靠救济金生活，这使得蒂尔伯里跌入了一种至今尚未走出的恶性循环当中。
The result, in Britain's prosperous
south-east, is a polyp of hard-up, mostly white, grumpy people. During a day
wandering Tilbury's run-down rows of public housing and depressing high street,
with its boarded-up premises and betting shops, your columnist heard almost
nothing nice said about the place. People who had lived in Tilbury for
generations described it as “hopeless”, “a third-world place” and, in the
favourite local phrase, “a shithole and beyond”. Tilbury's Labour Party
candidate, Polly Billington, calls it a “northern town in the south”. It is no
wonder that the comic Sacha Baron Cohen, currently making a mocking film about
the northern town of Grimsby, is shooting it in Tilbury.
这种恶性循环的结果，就是让这里以白人为主的民众变成了富庶的英国东南部的一块息肉，他们不仅穷得叮当响，而且还牢骚满腹。开车在这里大街上闲逛，给人一种压抑的感觉。到处都是一排排破旧的公租房，一个个已经被钉上了木板的办公场所和彩票销售点。在这过程中，笔者几乎没有听到一句说这里好的话。那些已经在这里生活了几代的居民把蒂尔伯里说成是一个“毫无希望”所在，是“第三世界的某个地方”。用当地人常挂在嘴边的话说就是：“没有比这里更烂的地方了”。当地的工党候选人
Polly Billington
称之为“南方的北方城镇”。难怪笑星沙查·巴隆·科恩眼下正在这里拍摄他那部嘲笑北方城镇格里姆斯比的电影。
This also makes the town fashionable in
Westminster, where the travails of Britain's white working class are causing
concern. Underscoring how stubbornly they languish, a recent parliamentary
study confirmed that poor white British children do worse in school than those
of any other group save Romany gypsies. But this fresh attention to the issue
is also because it is election season and winning working-class love is, for
differing reasons, a preoccupation of all the main parties. For David Cameron's
ruling Conservatives, getting such Britons off welfare and into work is a
fiscal and moral mission and a test of Britain's ability to endure austerity.
For Labour, they represent an identity crisis.
这还使得这个小镇成为正在引发他们对英国白人劳动阶层种种艰难直关注的议会的新宠。议会一项最新研究证实，在学习方面，贫穷的英国白人的孩子比除去吉普赛人之外的其他人群的孩子都要差。但是，对这个问题的最新关注还有另外一个原因，那就是：现在正值选举季，为了不同的原因去赢得劳动阶层的欢心是所有主流政党的当务之急。对于正在执政的卡梅伦的保守党来说，让这样的英国人扔掉福利去找份工作，既是一个财政任务，也是一种道德使命，还是对英国承受财政紧缩能力的一个测试。对于工党来说，这些人代表的是一种认同危机。
Though increasingly drawn from and oriented
towards middle England, where most voters reside, Britain's main opposition
still finds its cherished moral authority in a romantic association with the
working-class people for whom it was formed. That is why Labour's unexpected losses
to the populist UK Independence party (UKIP) in recent local elections, in
hard-up places such as Tilbury, sent the party's leader Ed Miliband scuttling
to Thurrock, the Tory-held marginal in which the town falls. There is now an
argument within Labour over how to avoid a repeat of this disaster in next
year's general election, for which Thurrock is UKIP's number two target seat;
some want to ape UKIP with a more populist, especially anti-immigration,
message.
对于英国的主要反对党来说，尽管他们正在日渐得到并逐步转向大多数选民所居住的英格兰中部，但是仍旧在于为之所组成的劳动阶层的罗曼蒂克式的关系中找到了他们所珍视的道德权威，而这也正是工党在最近的地方选举中，在把他们的党魁艾德·米利班德派到瑟罗克，令保守党在该地的领先优势丧失后，仍旧在像蒂尔伯里这样的穷地方，意外地输给民粹主义的英国独立党的原因。鉴于瑟罗克是独立党在明年大选中的第二个目标席位，工党内部正就如何避免灾难重现进行讨论。有人主张效仿独立党，发出一种更加民粹的信息，尤其是在反对移民这个问题上。
