[纽约时报 2011.7.23]粗鲁的不列颠

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/sunday-review/24england.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

News Analysis
Rude Britannia
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: July 23, 2011

John F. Burns is the London bureau chief of The New York Times.

LONDON



IT was the idyll carried in my backpack through nearly 40 years traveling the distant world: the gilded memories of the England where I grew up, the land of Henry V at Agincourt and Nelson at Trafalgar, of Churchill and the Battle of Britain, of Shakespeare and Locke and Orwell — of all that England and its monarchs, statesmen, philosophers, writers, inventors and explorers had given the world.

And then, coming home after half a lifetime as a foreign correspondent to an assignment in London, my first job at home since I was a teenage brick-carrier on a Thames-side building site, brought the kind of dulling return to earth that comes when remembrance collides with less happy truths. England — Britain, better said — was still a country with wide freedoms and opportunities, accomplishments and pleasures, that are hugely envied in the vast landscapes of the earth where people live in dictatorship and poverty. But there was much, too, that disappointed, that suggested that for all that had improved there was much, too, that was at risk of being lost.

Fortunately, I have a wife and adult children to caution me against becoming an aging gripe, and to remind me that the England of Charles Dickens — the England of my great-grandfather’s time — was a much rougher and crueler place, unrecognizable now in a country that has ascended to levels of affluence and social justice that Dickens could barely imagine. Still, I was far from alone, I knew, in lamenting the eroded sensibilities and courtesies, the coarsening of life in the public sphere and the rough-tongued disdain that seemed to have seeped into our streets and newspapers and broadcast media, and the abandonment of standards that touched even great national institutions like the BBC, Parliament and Scotland Yard.

Much of this flooded back last week as the country struggled to absorb the latest twists in a scandal that has enveloped Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain, and with it Britain’s politicians and police. Some commentators have seen it as a storm in a teacup, and urged that the focus shift to weightier matters like the European financial crisis and, now, to the terrorism attack in Norway, a 90-minute flight away.

Prime Minister David Cameron, snared in the scandal by his links to Murdoch executives and editors, pointed in that direction when he accompanied his mea culpa in Parliament on Wednesday with an appeal for the Labour opposition to turn to the “issues that people really care about,” including large-scale unemployment and resetting the country’s deeply debt-strapped economy.

But others have seen a far deeper malaise in the revelations about reporters and private investigators hacking into the cellphone voice mails of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, among them a 13-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered; about editors and corporate executives who failed to constrain them, or even actively connived in hiding their wrongdoing; about police investigators who seem to have been hushing the truth, barely bothering to look at the mass of evidence that pointed to widespread abuse; and, perhaps most depressing, about politicians from both major parties, Conservatives and Labour, who stood by, preferring to curry favor with Mr. Murdoch, his son James and other executives of his News International subsidiary, in the belief that their support was indispensable in gaining and retaining power.

Prime Minister Cameron has, to be sure, gone a long way toward acknowledging the seriousness of the scandal, at least in its own narrow terms. He has announced a wide-ranging inquiry into the police incompetence and apparent corruption, effectively forced the resignations of two of the top officers at Scotland Yard, including the country's highest-ranking policeman, and admitted he should never have hired Andy Coulson, the former Murdoch tabloid editor, as the government’s communications chief. He has spoken of the “despicable” nature of the tabloid malpractice, saying of the cozy world that produced the scandal, “We’ve all been in this together — the press, politicians and leaders of all parties — and yes, that includes me.”

But it has been left to the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to suggest that the scandal has revealed something much broader, by depicting what has happened as a symptom of a wholesale corruption of values in Britain’s public and private life. In Parliament and elsewhere, he has stolen a march on the prime minister and turned upside down what had been conventional political wisdom — that he was no match for the sure-footed, smooth-spoken Mr. Cameron, and seemed condemned to lead Labour through long years in the political wilderness.

Looking back over only the last three years, Mr. Miliband has said that the three great crises to hit Britain since then — the banking crash of 2008, the furor over fraudulent parliamentary expenses in 2009 and the tabloid scandal — have been rooted in a culture that engendered a “shirking of basic responsibility” from “top to bottom” in British life, that “sends the message that anything goes, that right and wrong don’t matter, that we can all be in it for ourselves as long as we can get away with it.”

“What,” he said, “is a young person, just starting out in life, trying to do the right thing, supposed to think when he sees a politician fiddling the expenses system, a banker raking off millions without deserving it, or a press baron abusing the trust of ordinary people?”

It seems far from certain that the country is ready for Mr. Miliband’s call to arms, and even if it were, whether the afflictions he describes are amenable to government action — whether they are, in fact, so rooted in the zeitgeist that tackling them could never work without an improbable watershed in cultural, social and political life. Some, no doubt, will point to politicians who have launched into moral crusades before, and crashed into a wall of popular indifference, and say that sermons are best left to the pulpit. Similar indictments of contemporary political and popular mores have been made for years by religious leaders, including a succession of archbishops of Canterbury, and made little appreciable impact.

For now, at any rate, it seems likely that the tabloid scandal will run its course, with at least some journalists and police officers going to jail. Mr. Cameron may, or may not, survive, though most British commentators believe he will, in the absence of any “smoking gun” that shows he knew of evidence directly implicating Mr. Coulson in the phone-hacking long before his former media chief resigned. The country’s newspapers seem certain to come under closer regulatory scrutiny, though the pushback against any curbs on press freedoms, as distinct from criminality, will be fierce. And the rhythms of life beyond Fleet Street, Parliament and Scotland Yard, in all likelihood, will go on much as they did before.

And that will leave many in the country to ponder, like Mr. Miliband, how Britain could have reached this pass. Over the course of a meal together last week, three of my fellow countrymen who have lived for years abroad ticked off some of the things that have troubled them about life back at home: policemen behaving with an arrogance and indifference unremembered from childhood days; top-level soccer players earning astronomical salaries behaving like cheap thugs, on and off the field; multi-million-dollar performers on television and radio, including the BBC, resorting to coarse language, and, on at least one occasion in recent memory, bullying and taunting an aging comic actor for their trifling amusement; gangs of feral youths prowling center-city areas menacingly after dark; and a beer culture among the nation’s youth that has made public drunkenness a scourge.

The list is long, and its deepest causes not simple to discern. Some, perhaps, lie in what has otherwise been hugely beneficial. The end of Britain’s empire in the 1950s and 1960s, coupled with the gradual erosion of once-rigid class divides, have cast the country loose from the old anchors, and left many people in a restless search for new certainties, new sources of identity and pride. The collapse of standards in the public education system, once among the world’s best, have precipitated an epidemic of antisocial behavior among urban youth. The decline of manufacturing industries has fostered soaring unemployment and, among many, a lifelong welfare dependency.

Three decades after Margaret Thatcher took office on a crusade to resurrect traditional standards, there are many signs that she may have been a blip on an otherwise descending trajectory. While Mr. Cameron has taken up many of her themes — along with Mr. Miliband, though he, as the Labour leader, would be loathe to admit it — a man who had a season in Downing Street over the past year as one of Mr. Cameron’s advisers surveyed the turmoil of the News of the World scandal and offered a revealing conclusion. Britain, he said, resembled more than anything, a “post-communist society” — unhinged from the old verities, and not yet in sight of anything enduring to replace them. It made for a disheartening verdict on a deeply discouraging week.

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