为什么英国政府选择将英国铁路私有化而不像其他国家那样将其国有化?
2024-01-15 大号儿童 3776
正文翻译

Why did the UK government choose to privatise British railways rather than nationalise them like other countries have done?

为什么英国政府选择将英国铁路私有化而不像其他国家那样将其国有化?

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评论翻译
Nicholas Stone
A succession of UK governments have variously nationalised and privatised British railways.

历届英国政府在不同时间采取了国有化和私有化的方式对英国的铁路进行管理。

In 1914, the UK government took control of railways. After the 1921 government reform, there was nationalisation 1947. Another programme of nationalisation began in 2014 with Network Rail and was completed in 2020, when all remaining private passenger franchise were scrapped.

1914年,英国政府接管了铁路。在1921年的政府改革后,于1947年进行了一次国有化。2014年,英国政府开始了一项以网络铁路为核心的国企国有化计划,并于2020年完成,取消了所有剩余的私营客运特许经营权。
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The UK government chose to privatise the railways in 1923, as enacted by the Railways Act 1921. Privatisation with four regional operators was the government’s preferred policy, with concerns that existing nationalisation was leading to poor management. The UK government undertook a second privatisation in 1994, because ministers thought that commercial input would lead to cost reduction and better use of assets.

英国政府选择在1923年进行铁路私有化,这一决定由1921年的铁路法案实施。政府倾向于通过四家地区运营商进行私有化,原因是担心现有的国有化形式导致管理不善。英国政府在1994年进行了第二次私有化,因为政府认为商业参与可以降低成本并更好地利用资产。

The big four were the privatised railway companies created by the UK government in 1923, after nine years of nationalisation. These companies existed until 1947, when the railway were again nationalised.

四大铁路公司是英国政府在经历了9年的国有化后,于1923年创建的私有化铁路公司。这些公司一直存在到1947年,当时铁路再次国有化。

The second period UK rail privatisation between 1994–2014 has been a dead loss. Private companies botched their finances and were nationalised. The Covid pandemic rendered the entire privatisation model as unworkable. Railtrack cost overruns bankrupted the company in 2000.

1994年至2014年之间的第二阶段英国铁路私有化失败了。私人公司搞砸了它们的财务状况,最终被国有化。新冠疫情使整个私有化模式不可行。2000年,Railtrack铁路的成本超支导致该公司破产。

Overlooked is the parallel and failed bus deregulation launched by government in 1985. Another dead loss with rising ticket prices, needless duplication, poor passenger wayfinding, a focus on profitable trunk routes, complex fares, incoherent service provision, and falling passenger numbers outside London. This failed bus deregulation was scrapped and is being replaces with a nationwide fares cap in England, more local authority control, unified timetables and improve passenger wayfinding. On this, Cornwall, Greater Manchester and Greater London are leading the way.

被忽视的是政府在1985年启动的平行且失败的公交车放权。这也是一个彻底失利,票价上涨、重复运营、乘客导向不佳、关注利润丰厚的干线路线、复杂的票价、无条理的服务提供和伦敦以外的乘客数量下降。这个失败的公交车放权计划被取消,正在用英格兰全国范围内的票价上限、更多地方政府控制、统一时刻表和改善乘客导向来替代。在这方面,康沃尔、大曼彻斯特和大伦敦正在带头。

Philip Collins
The UK railway companies weren’t nationalised in 1914. Using powers granted to the government by the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871, the Railway Executive Committee took control of the national rail network on 4 August 1914, the day that war was declared and mobilisation began. The Railway Executive Committee (REC) had been formed in 1912 to act as an intermediary between the War Office and the various British railway companies.

英国铁路公司并没有在1914年进行国有化。根据《1871年军队管理法》所授予的权力,铁路执行委员会于1914年8月4日,即宣布战争并开始动员的那一天,接管了国家铁路网络。铁路执行委员会(REC)成立于1912年,旨在充当英国战争部和各大铁路公司之间的中间人。

REC control lasted from 1914 to 1921 when it was returned to the private companies that had existed in 1914. The Railways Act 1921 led to the amalgamation of those companies into the “Big Four” companies from 1st Jan 1923.

REC的控制持续了从1914年到1921年,当时控制权被归还给1914年存在的私营公司。1921年的铁路法案导致这些公司合并成为“四大公司”,自1923年1月1日起生效。

Brian James Fretwell
They said that competition would put prices down, but they had closed lines that duplicated routes in the 1950 and 1960 so there was no real scope for competiton. That meant THAT didn’t work either.

他们曾经说过竞争会降低价格,但他们在20世纪50年代和60年代关闭了重复路线的铁路,因此并没有真正的竞争空间。这意味着这种做法也没有奏效。

David Chambers
What I often wonder is when British railways were being rebuilt after WW2 why were some mainlines such as the London - Glasgow and Crewe - Holyhead lines not rebuilt to the Berne loading gauge? This could have been accomplished with electrification of the former.
Otherwise there is much to be appreciated with British Railways such the development of mark 2 and mark 3 carriages. It was a pity that BR could not order Electro Motive diesels which would have revolutionised operations.

我常常想知道的是,二战后重建英国铁路时,为什么一些主干线如伦敦-格拉斯哥和克鲁-霍利黑德线没有按照伯尔尼限界进行重建呢?这可以通过对前者进行电气化来实现。 除此之外,英国铁路还有很多值得赞赏的地方,比如开发了二型和三型客车。可惜的是,英国铁路无法订购革命性的电力柴油机车。


Colin Riegels
You have to cast your mind back to the 1980s. Back then the UK government had enjoyed a lot of success with privatisation - it enabled them to sell off underperforming state assets to the private sector, who could run them better and more cheaply, and pay the Treasury for the privilege which funded tax cuts. The first few privatisations went very well indeed. The excerpt below is from the Harvard Business Review in 1992.[1]

你需要回到20世纪80年代。当时英国政府通过私有化取得了很多成功,这使他们能够将表现不佳的国有资产出售给私人部门,私人部门能够更好地运营这些资产,并支付给财政部门以获得特权,从而支持减税政策。前几次私有化非常成功。下面这段摘自1992年的哈佛商业评论。

And so, unsurprisingly, the government decided it wanted “more”. The only trouble was that it had already sold off the best bits - British Gas, British Telecom, British Airways, British Aerospace, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Britoil (remember them?), etc. And so eventually all it was left with was the crap.

所以,毫不意外地,政府决定要“更多”。唯一的问题是,它已经把最好的东西卖掉了——英国煤气公司、英国电信、英国航空、英国宇航、劳斯莱斯、捷豹、英国石油(还记得他们吗?)等等。最终,政府只剩下了垃圾。

However, because it had been so successful, they decided to take a punt anyhow. So they sold off other pretty marginal stuff, including the rail companies, and then separately sold off the railtrack, and they kind of hoped for the best. But the best didn’t really happen.

然而,由于私有化取得了如此成功,他们还是决定冒险赌一把。于是,他们出售了其他相当边缘的资产,包括铁路公司,然后又单独出售了铁路轨道,他们希望一切顺利。但最好的并没有真正发生。

To be fair, the railways were pretty poor before privatisation too. But nationalisation certainly didn’t make them better. Equally, I am fairly certain that taking them back into public ownership won’t fix them either.

公平地说,在私有化之前,铁路就很糟糕。但国有化并没有让它们变得更好。同样,我相当确定将它们重新纳入公有制也不会解决问题。

Tom Gunner
This is one of the untold miserable consequences of the 1992 General Election, which Labour was expected to win. We were left with the fag end of a Tory administration out of (good) ideas. Water and electricity were privatized too. My own local privatized water provider monopoly, Thames Water, is now owned by an Australian venture capital company, Macquarrie, which offloaded £12 billion of debt onto its books and let the system rot. We now have 1,000 discharges of raw sewage into the local rivers every day (2.75 million hours in 2021). Nothing can be done because it’s too expensive now to renationalize them. Longstanding Iron Man contests have been cancelled after the swimmers got ill. It’s a national scandal.

这是1992年大选一个未被预料到的悲惨后果之一,当时工党被认为会赢得选举。水和电也被私有化了。我自己当地的私有化水务服务提供商垄断者——泰晤士水公司,现在由澳大利亚风险投资公司 Macquarrie 所拥有,将 120 亿英镑的债务转嫁到它的账簿上,并让系统腐烂。我们现在每天有 1,000 次原汁原味的污水排放到当地河流中(2021 年共计 2,750 万小时)。现在国有化太昂贵了,无法再做任何事情。长期的钢铁侠比赛因游泳者感到不适而被取消。这是全国性的丑闻。

Alex Boyd
The sewage discharges issue that has garnered so much media coverage is, as with most issues, more complex than the headlines suggest.
For a start, we have only been widely monitoring them for about three years since, guess what, the volume of events (a discharge) appear unacceptable.
Yes, there's is underinvestment in the water systems, no the EA doesn't have sufficient powers and no, it's not all poo that causes the overflows.

像大多数问题一样,得到了很多媒体关注的污水排放问题比标题所示更加复杂。 首先,我们只是在过去三年中广泛监测它们,因为事件(即排放)的数量被认为是不可接受的。 是的,供水系统存在投资不足的问题,环保局没有足够的电力,而且也不是所有的排放都是因为粪便引起的。

Nick Nicholas
Of course the Thatcher minister who penned that piece was as naive and boosterish about human nature as the centralized economy socialists he thought he was vanquishing.
The way he keeps asserting that democratic governments will provide wise oversight is as daft as both Marx and Jefferson: history tells otherwise…

当然,写这篇文章的撒切尔大臣对人性的看法,和他自以为要征服的中央集权经济社会主义者一样天真和乐观。
他一直声称民主政府将提供明智的监督,这与马克思和杰斐逊一样愚蠢:历史告诉我们的并非如此……

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Alek Trajkov
It will not fix them, but it will certainly fix the prices and the fact that you have to show the ticket 3 times whilst traveling. It will probably remove the dangerous turnstiles at the entry that clog whenever more than 2 trains arrive at the same time. Compare that to EU where you just hop on and off.

这可能不能解决问题,但肯定能解决价格问题,以及你在旅行时必须出示车票3次的事实。它可能会移除入口处的危险闸门,当超过2列火车同时到达时会造成堵塞。相比之下,在欧盟,你可以随意上下车。

Ken Johnson
Sheer doctrinaire capitalism and the weakness of the only opposition party. Privatisation of the railways, and every other privatisation, was a disaster just as everybody in the railway industry said it would be. John Major said that fares would fall after privatisation. In reality fares have roughly quadrupled and subsidies to the operating companies are six times what the subsidy to British Rail used to be. Stations and services have closed, though some have opened. As in 1964 when there was a massive closure programme under way, the Labour Party is too timid to denounce the T*ry vandalism for what it is and re-nationalise the railways without compensation.

纯粹的教条资本主义和唯一反对党的软弱是1992年大选的灾难。铁路私有化以及其他所有私有化都是灾难,正如铁路业内的每个人所说的那样。约翰·梅杰曾表示,私有化后车费将会下降。实际上,票价已经猛增了大约四倍,对运营公司的补贴是英国铁路时代的六倍。车站和服务已经关闭,尽管有些已经重新开放。就像1964年正在进行大规模关闭计划一样,工党太胆小了,不敢公开谴责托利党的破坏行为,也没有不赔偿地重新国有化铁路。
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John Hudson
They were nationalised by the post war, Labour Government. Then they were privatised by the Tory Government of John Major, who claimed “It was to save the burden on the British tax payer”. Which is Ironic, as it now costs the British tax payer, many times more than it did when they owned it! HS2 alone, if it’s built or not, is costing the tax payer billions, for a very debateable benefit!

他们被战后的工党政府收归国有。随后,约翰·梅杰(John Major)的保守党政府将它们私有化,他声称“这是为了减轻英国纳税人的负担”。具有讽刺意味的是,英国纳税人现在花费的钱比他们拥有它的时候要多很多倍!单单是HS2项目,无论建设与否,都将为纳税人带来数十亿的花费,这是一个非常有争议的利益!

He promised a better service, less delays and cheaper fares. None of which have materialise. Manufacture and maintenance of rolling stock etc, in this country, has reduced to a small fraction of what it was, so we rely, mainly, on other nations, like Japan and Germany, to supply our needs. The few remaining companies here that still exist, are mostly foreign owned, and have to compete for orders.

他承诺提供更好的服务、更少的延误和更便宜的票价。但这些都没有实现。在这个国家,铁路车辆的制造和维修等已经减少到以前的一小部分,所以我们主要依赖其他国家,比如日本和德国,来满足我们的需求。这里仅存的几家公司大多是外资企业,它们必须争夺订单。
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Derby, where I live, flourished as a railway town, being the headquarters of the Midland Railway Company. It now, has one, small, foreign owned, company, making trains. There used to be the ‘Raiway Technical Centre’, where new trains and ideas were developed, including the HS125 and Maglev. It is now a business centre.

我住在的德比是一个铁路城镇,在中央铁路公司的总部所在地。现在,只有一家小的外国公司在这里制造火车。曾经有“铁路技术中心”,那里开发了新的列车和想法,包括HS125和磁悬浮列车。现在它已经变成了商务中心。

Its a sad fact, many of the franchises are owned by foreign companies, including at least three nationalised railways, so we are, in effect, subsidising the share holders, and railway passengers, of other countries! How does that benefit us?

可悲的事实是,许多特许经营权都由外国公司拥有,包括至少三个国有铁路,因此我们实际上正在资助其他国家的股东和铁路乘客!这对我们有什么好处呢?

Doug Scott
It’s a shame I can only give it a single upvote, but the list of companies that were founded and funded by the taxpayer, then sold off at bargain basement prices, is much more extensive and, I believe, criminal. We already owned them.

可惜我只能给这篇文章一个赞,但是那些由纳税人创立和资助,然后以白菜价出售的公司名单更加广泛,我认为这是犯罪行为。我们本来就拥有它们。

Julia Boyd
They were nationalised earlier. Strikes were frequent.
Privatisation has lead to the highest travel costs in Europe - and now strikes are back on the frequent agenda.
Tory governments are unlikely to nationalise.

这些公司在更早的时候已经被国有化。罢工频繁发生。私有化导致了欧洲最高的旅行成本,现在罢工再次成为频繁议题。托利党政府不太可能国有化。

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