Dickens and the profit motive

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Stockholm where I’ve been stranded for the last 24 hours thanks to bad weather. Turns out the Swedish airport authorities aren’t any better at coping with snow than ours — which is surprising given how often it must snow over here. Nevertheless, it has given me an opportunity to reflect on why David Cameron hasn’t been more assiduous about following in the footsteps of Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of Sweden’s centre-right coalition. I think the answer has something to do with the works of Charles Dickens, particularly A Christmas Carol.

Sweden’s recent economic success — it recorded the strongest growth in the EU last year — has been chalked up to ‘the Swedish model’, whereby a significant percentage of public services are delivered by commercial providers. Reinfeldt and his pony-tailed finance minister Anders Borg have been more successful at cutting public expenditure than their British counterparts thanks to the efficiency savings this model has produced. Put simply, Swedish private companies have been able to deliver more for less.

British politicians of all stripes have embraced ‘the Swedish model’ (no jokes please), but the ‘marketisation’ of our public services has been happening very slowly nevertheless. For instance, Michael Gove has yet to allow for-profit companies to set up free schools, something that’s been possible in Sweden since 1992. This cautiousness has meant that only a modest number of free schools have been set up in England since 2010.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticising Gove for being too timid. Nor do I blame Nick Clegg for slamming the brakes on. Rather, I think the leaders of all the political parties have calculated that rolling out ‘the Swedish model’ too quickly would be politically imprudent.