2019年经济学人 路的尽头--特蕾莎·梅辞职(1)（在线收听）

Leaders

来源于《社论》版块

British politics

英国政治

The end of the road

路的尽头

The prime minister has run out of options. She will leave the country even more divided than she found it

首相已经没有选择了。她离开时，英国的分歧比她接手时还大

Theresa May has devoted her time in Downing Street to a single task: getting Britain out of the European Union. In November she cleared the first hurdle when she signed a draft Brexit deal with her opposite numbers in Brussels. But its terms were so much worse than those she had promised at home that she has been unable to get the deal through Parliament. MPs have rejected it three times, by crushing margins. Under pressure from her party, Mrs May has promised to quit if she fails on her fourth and final attempt. Even though the vote is not due until next month, it became clear this week that the deal was indeed doomed when her last-ditch attempt to win over doubters backfired spectacularly and triggered the resignation of a senior minister. At the same time, the Conservative Party is set to take a drubbing in European elections at the hands of Nigel Farage and his new Brexit Party. Britain will soon have a new prime minister.

特蕾莎·梅在唐宁街只做了一件事：脱欧。去年11月，她在布鲁塞尔与持相反意见的人签署了一份脱欧协议草案，扫除了第一个障碍。但该协议的条款比她在国内所承诺的要糟糕得多，以至于她无法在议会通过该协议。国会议员们三次否决该法案，以压倒性的优势通过。在党内的压力下，特蕾莎·梅承诺，如果第四次也是最后一次尝试失败，她将辞职。尽管投票要到下个月才截止，但本周情况变得明朗起来：她最后一次试图说服质疑派的努力却事与愿违，导致一名高级部长辞职。与此同时，英国保守党将在欧洲选举中惨败于奈杰尔?法拉奇及其新成立的英国退欧党。英国不久就会有一名新首相。

Historians may be a fraction kinder to Mrs May than today’s commentators. But the prime minister’s ineptitude has rendered the fiendishly hard Brexit project almost impossible. Faced with the many painful trade-offs that Brexit entails, Mrs May refused to accept that compromise was necessary until too late—after others’ positions had hardened and compromise was defined as losing. Many Leavers now believe that a perfect, costless version of Brexit exists, which they are being denied only through some mix of incompetence and conspiracy. At the same time many Remainers, seeing the government constantly in retreat, believe that Brexit could yet be cancelled altogether.

历史学家对梅的态度要比当今评论员温和得多。但首相的无能，使得极其艰难的英国脱欧计划几乎不可能实现。面对英国脱欧带来的诸多痛苦权衡，梅有必要拒绝妥协，而在其他人的立场变得强硬，妥协被定义为失败之后，拒绝已经为时已晚。如今，许多脱欧派人士认为，存在一种完美的、不需要付出任何代价的脱欧模式，但只是因为无能和阴谋的某种混合作用而被否定。与此同时，许多留欧派看到政府不断后退，认为英国脱欧仍有可能被完全取消。

This polarisation is Mrs May’s legacy—and it will bedevil her successor. In the aftermath of the referendum, nearly three years ago, many Brexiteers might have accepted a deal in which Britain left the single market and ended free movement, with temporary membership of the customs union as the only tie. Most now see such an outcome as an intolerable betrayal (never mind that some of them still seem unsure what a customs union actually is).

这种两极分化是梅遗留下来的问题，也将困扰她的继任者。大约三年前，公投结束后，许多脱欧派人士可能已经接受了一项协议，即英国退出单一市场，结束自由流动，唯一的纽带是暂时加入关税同盟。现在大多数人认为这样的结果是一种无法容忍的背叛（更不用说他们中的一些人似乎仍然不确定关税同盟到底是什么）。