Swedish thoughts

mitch

You just know our lot would get it arse about face except for the tax.

Carol-Ann

Great to have you back, Fraser!

Verity

Welcome back, Fraser!

You say,"...the Swedes have managed integration far better than Britain has."

The host country has absolutely no obligation to "manage integration" of uninvited immigrants. It's up to the immigrants to learn the language and integrate themselves with desptach, as humans have always known instinctively.

Even a dog joining a new pack knows to be humble and lurk around the edges until it is accepted.

If you have ever done any reading on Native Americans, you will have noted that when a member of one tribe immigrated over to another tribe and married into it, it was his/her job to adapt to the customs and manners of their new tribe. The new tribe didn't lift a finger. This is how it has worked, worldwide, since time began.

The "host society" has absolutely no responsibility other than to accord them the legal protection that everyone else - resident, tourist, business visitor - enjoys.

Pete, Scotland

Just in simple terms of personal perception and general wellbeing, how would you rate 'quality of life' in Sweden with the UK?

Verity

Well, Pete, Scotland, not that I've ever been to Sweden, but what the hell? - Sweden has never been the workshop of the world, so it has never developed huge manufacturing centres that served, in many instances, to break up families and communities as young people went to seek their fortune. Or just work.

Also, Sweden held its skirts back from the inconvenience of WWII.

I'll be intersted in Fraser's reply, though.

Howard Fargher

Brilliant post Fraser...hope its read by DC, MGove and Boris to give them even more determination to introduce here what has worked there. In fact your post is so enlightening, I trust Spectator is paying all your holiday bills as its far better than any MP expenses paid fact finding exercise

Mac

"perhaps the most left-wing (and high-taxed) country in the free world". Or perhaps there's a worthier recipient of this label right next door to Sweden?

When ministerial-level negotiations over the planned merger of the Norwegian and
Swedish equivalents of BT foundered in late
1999, the exasperated Swedish minister of business, Bjorn Rosengren, was interviewed, I think by NRK the Norwegian state broadcaster.
Unfortunately for him the tape was left running after he thought the interview was over and his
conclusion - 'what can you expect of the last Soviet state in Europe' - did not endear him to Norwegian listeners (and especially as it was uttered by a Swede).

mckenzie

Interesting article. The trouble with me though is that I have lived in Wales for most of my life. I tried Manchester for a while, and then Swindon, only to move back here. What you have described sends shivers of revulsion down my back...but that's me.

Kit

"the Swedes have managed integration far better than Britain has"

Our record is poor but much better than Sweden. The unemployment rate among immigrants in Sweden is 29 percent (last time I looked). And the level on racism is startling and is more open and acceptable than here.

Fraser Nelson

Pete, put it this way - when my wife wants to shock her friends in Stockholm with tales about life in England she says she's met people who don't have kids who are worried where those unborn kids will be schooled. The Swedes are open-jawed at this, unable to fathom how a rich country like Britain can't sort out education. I also met a Swedish doctor who worked a while in the NHS saying "it was really important to the English to wear a tie, but not so important to wash your hands". So I'd say quality of life, and much else, is better in Sweden.

But job opportunities and the chance for self-improvement are far better in the UK. Take Brown's "Fishing in Utopia" book. He glorifies Sweden in its industrial heyday, bemoans the wicked Thatcher, then admits he (and his Swedish-born son) came back to Britain to find work and enjoy the fruit of her reforms.

The drawback to Sweden is the feeling that there is only so far you can (or should) climb. There is a word that sums up the country's mentality - lagom - not too much, not too little. As they saying goes "Lagom är bäst" which thankfully has no English translation. Those who wish to excel often find this approach stifling, and go live/work elsewhere.

Again, Brown's book sums it up well. Olaf Palme, the ex-PM, "devoted his career to ensuring no Swede would ever need to experience the American combination of material poverty and boundless optimism. He succeeded so completely that he died leaving a country where no one was poor, and no one had any room for optimism."

Fraser Nelson

Kit, as with most left-wing countries the Swedish employment laws protect those in the labour market from those seeking to enter it. So I'd say the employment barriers facing immigrants is due more to socialism than racism.

Verity

Kit - See my post above before racing onto the page to post.

There is no obligation on the part of any country in the world to have a "managed integration" policy for immigrants.

Immigrants throughout the ages have integrated themselves, through human intelligence and self-interest.

As I mentioned above, Kit, even a dog in the wild who has lost its pack and finds another acts with extreme humility, lopes on the outskirts and tries to make itself useful to the pack. In other words, even dogs work at their own integration.

The analogy is not as far-fetched as it might seem as both dogs and animals are pack animals.

When you write, "Our record is poor", Kit, you mean the record of immigrants to Britain is poor. The host society bears no responsibility for people wishing to join the pack.

We don't have a record. The immigrants do.

Jewish - and it never crosses our minds to think of our Jewish countrymen as "immigrants" - have a superb record of intelligent integration, as do the Hindus and the Sikhs, all of whom we think of as British.

Frankly, the W Indians have a weaker record, which is too bad as they have been in Britain the longest. And the worst is the record of the Pakistani immigrants.

As to the Somali immigrants, I am totally baffled by what they are doing in our country as there is no historical tie with their tribes.

Verity

Fraser - I think it was P J O'Rourke (OK, I know it was p J O'Rourke, but can't remember where) who wrote a hysterically funny article/chapter about "lagom är bäst". If I can find the reference, I'll post it.

cityboozer

A good piece, Fraser. It really is quite hard to understand the place. The people are lovely but the lack of ambition is palpable everywhere. Everyone seems to be sufficiently happy with their lot that there's none of the dissatisfaction and yes, envy, which drives us forward.

The social side of lagom is well expressed in the "Jante Law" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law) which seems to apply even to the monarchy.

A final minor point - I believe that in Sweden every household has the right to distill a smallish amount of spirits (for some reason I remember 9 litres) without having to pay duty. So even the moonshine is regulated.

Nicholas

Innovate don't imitate. And much of this search for what works would not be necessary if socialists and other misguided idiots had not destroyed what already worked here almost beyond living memory.

And I concur with Verity's comment about the Somali immigrants. Baffling.

Play

The Guardian has held up Sweden and other Scandinavian countries as some kind of paradise for years. Now they've adopted a few right-wing ideas, the Spectator has joined in the applause. I still find it hard to see what a culturally and racially homogenous, heavily socially controlled country with a sustained illiberal tradition and an insular mindset can teach the UK. Maybe it's just that it's the kind of country some Britons - including Spectator writers – wished they inhabited. Not I; it's boring. Give me the US anyday, it's there that a remarkable urban regeneration has taken place, with far more pertinent lessons for Britain. May I suggest some of your correspondents subscribe to City Journal?

Ørjan

Crime sttistics are going throu the roof. Unemployment are record high among immigrants in Sweden... Did you really leave the hotel bar?

Max Kaye

Other than Abba, Volvo, Saab, Scania, Erikson, Blonde Bombshells, Max von Sydow and Bjorn Borg, what have the Swedes ever done for us?

(Please don't mention Ingmar Bergman. I might have to slit my wrists....).

Play

This is further evidence that we're all social democrats now, at least as far as the main three parties go. Perhaps we might learn more about how Britain negotiates the future from our astonishing success in the Beijing Olympics. Much has been made of the “posh” backgrounds of our medal-winners, by Leo McKinstry in today's Mail for example, though this has been refuted by Jim White in the Telegraph. But what actually unites these successful athletes is their eccentricity. They are the quirky, odd obsessives that this country used to indulge, before it became obsessed with social egalitarianism a la Sweden (significantly it's the biggest haul since the 1920s). This country should learn once again to cultivate eccentricity, embrace the odd and quirky, not just in sport but in all fields – think of Alan Turing, Tim Berners Lee, Reginald Mitchell, Nick Park, Issigonis, numerous pop stars, authors, film-makers et al. There's no future in conformity, just a slow, comfortable death.

cityboozer

Max Kaye - don't forget Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins!

Play - I agree with the principle but I think that Alan Turing might be a poor example having been all but hounded to death precisely because of whom he chose to "embrace"!

cityboozer

I take it back! Tove Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finn.

james

'the Swedes have managed integration far better than Britain has'
I am not so sure. I live in that part of SW London that has a large number of Swedes. I know two racially mixed swedish couples both of whom choose to live here because they perceive that there is still an undercurrent of racism in Sweden (similar to that in this country a few decades ago). The lagom attitude is still prevalent, in course of work a couple of years ago I met a number of (Board level) executive compensation specialists, all of whom knew that by comparison with their peers (eurpoean as well as american) executive pay was low but it seems to be accepted as the price for living in a country where the notion of social justice really means something. The downside is that overseas talent is hard to recruit. Although this did not seem to bother those with whom I conversed, I suspect in the long run it will be detrimental to Swedish interests.

Rob Linton

Just come back from a stag do in Stockholm, and my thoughts are these:

Booze and strip clubs were disappointingly expensive - women were beautiful.

Unfortunately - no where in the world gives you everything you want

Verity

I repeat: the host society is under absolutely no obligation to "manage integration" of aliens who manage to get into the country. This point needs to b acknowledged.

The responsibility to fit in and not be too much noticed is the immigrants'.

And there should be zero "asylum seekers" in Northern Europe because there are plenty of other safe countries before you reach the edge of Europe in Scandinavia and Britain. This is all socialist manipulation, on Britain's part at least, to weaken the cohesiveness, built up over centuries of established countries. The kind of countries socialists bittery loathe.

Cityboozer - Tothe Janssen was a Swedish speaking Finn. For some reason, this sentence astounds me. Did this Finn speak any other foreign languages, or just Swedish?

Fergus Pickering

Good God,man, you wouldn't actually want to LIVE there, would you? The weather, the dark winters, the lack of cricket, the cost of booze. Or has the booze got cheaper?

cityboozer

Verity,

Swedish isn't a foreign language in Finland.

Wikipedia says: "As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally written in Swedish."

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_Finns in the unlikely case that you give a monkey's.

Verity is Nuts

Verity - I assume you are separating seekers of asylum from economic migrants.

If so, I think there is a strong moral case for European countries sharing the burden of asylum seekers rather than allowing neighbouring countries to shoulder the full burden.

Similarly, a host country helping asylum seekers to assimilate probably helps to avoid ghettos forming.

Verity

Verity Is Nuts (the verb should have been capitalised), I am saying that often there isn't a hair's breadth between the two.

It would be cheaper just to go over and bomb the government buildings in Mogadishu than give the money owned by British taxpayers to vast numbers of primitive "asylum seekers".

And how is it our responsibility? We seem to have become the generic colonial power. But Somalis played no part in our national narrative (except now they have weaselled in and have established their Gar Islamic courts in our country.)

Marian C

Verity @ 12:29am - Well said, you have hit the nail on the head.

Like wise with Nicholas @ 8:56am -"And I concur with Verity's comment about the Somali immigrants. Baffling"

I too find this baffling.

Verity

The book is P J O'Rourke's "Eat The Rich", a sly tratise on economics, and very funny, too, as is all his work. The chapter on Sweden begins on page 72 and he addresses "lagom är bäst" in it.

To anyone who hasn't read "Eat The Rich", buy it immediately, on your way home.

Oscar

Verity,

Swedish is the 1st language for ethnic swedes in Finland.