The Swedish Model

As previously noted, Britain is on the road to becoming the new Sweden. Just two months ago, the ghastly Polly Toynbee wrote an article effectively bemoaning how long it would take her messiah, Grodon Brown, to remould Britain on the Swedish model. Incredibly, which is to say in the face of all that history has to teach us about the perils of trusting government, she writes, with all appearance of a straight face and earnest intent:

Brown will not turn Swedish in one spasm. It took the Social Democrats nearly 70 unbroken years of steady progressive government to reach this civilised state of relative equality, high living standards, excellent public services - and high happiness ratings. It needs citizens who want to travel that way. It needs trust in government, which semi-anarchic Britain and its poisonous rightwing, anti-state press forever undermines.

The irony of having such wilfully ignorant, prejudiced, ostrich-like remarks published on the internet, that triumph of deregulation in the face of state interference to which were the state still running the telecommunications systems in this country our access would be both unreliable and desperately slow, is almost certainly lost on Pol, who is unlikely ever to have read this article by Nick Herbert which outlines the situation in Sweden far more dispassionately (and therefore accurately) than Brown's head cheerleader would ever be capable of. Eww, Polly in a cheerleader's outfit. What a thought. I'm tempted to Fisk her entire article, but I think it can be dismissed in its entirety by pointing out that 70 unbroken years of one party rule is generally a terrible thing for a country, particularly as statist a party as Sweden's Social Democrats. Your colours are showing, old 'been.

Tempting and delightfully easy as ridiculing the Seventies throwback Polly Toynbee is, this is not the thrust of my point today. Anyone with the merest independent streak to his thinking knows that the Swedish model is a thin disguise for the wholesale purchase of votes from supplicants (as Janet Daley says, if you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people) rather than any truly "progressive" policy. But since Brown's independent streak pretty much runs out of steam after wanting to be PM because he "stood aside" for Blair in the Labour leadership election of 1994 (and is he actually foolish, arrogant and hubristic enough to believe that this entitles him to become PM by right of inheritance? Can he possibly give any credence to the notion that had he become Labour leader in 1994 there would still be a Labour Premiership to inherit at all?), he's charging ahead with this remodelling, which brings me to the less savoury aspect of the Swedish model.

Like Britain, Sweden has taken in hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the last twenty years, and their experience of combining the multiculturalist ethic with an overweening welfare state does not appear to have been a happy one.

Just one of the many pages linked from that page is this one. Or as Polly says, "how it would raise spirits if the chancellor would suggest Sweden as the chosen model for his coming time."