Norway

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Magnetic north

‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does is supposed to be so brilliant that it doesn’t have to be more than merely sketched.’ Near contemporaries, Munch and Astrup were both innovative and admired painters but while Munch is today one of the few household-name artists, thanks to one misunderstood and overrated painting, Astrup has been neglected by everyone outside Norway. Happily, this is a travesty soon to be rectified by Dulwich Picture Gallery, which next month stages the first major exhibition of Astrup’s work to be held in Britain. Unlike many other Norwegian painters, Munch included, Astrup

Thursday

Daniel Hannan

What Brexit looks like

‘So what’s your alternative?’ demand Euro-enthusiasts. ‘D’you want Britain to be like Norway? Or like Switzerland? Making cuckoo clocks? Is that what you want? Is it? Eh?’ The alternative to remaining in a structurally unsafe building is, of course, walking out; but I accept that this won’t quite do as an answer. Although staying in the EU is a greater risk than leaving — the migration and euro crises are deepening, and Britain is being dragged into them — change-aversion is deep in our genome, and we vote accordingly. Europhiles know that most referendums go the way of the status quo, which is why their campaign is based around conjuring

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Mr Cameron goes to Reykjavik

David Cameron is off to Iceland today to give a speech on Britain’s European Union membership and it’s a clear signal that he will eventually campaign for Britain to remain in. Until now, the Prime Minister has avoided talking about why Britain should ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ the EU — instead focusing on the importance of the renegotiations. His argument will be based on Iceland and Norway, who are members of the European Economic Area — which allows them to trade inside the single market. According comments from No.10 sources, Cameron will warn this means they have less control over decision making in Brussels and this kind of looser relationship would not be right for Britain. One source

James Forsyth James Forsyth

David Cameron’s ‘milk and honey’ intervention on the EU could be a mistake

David Cameron’s decision to wade into the EU debate by dismissing the Norway option and warning that there is no ‘milk and honey’ alternative to EU membership is one of the most significant political moments of this parliament. It is Cameron entering the referendum fray, and long before the renegotiation has been concluded. On one level, Cameron is correct. There are Eurosceptics who have advocated the Norway option. In his keynote speech on Europe last year, Owen Paterson — who is on the parliamentary planning committee of Vote Leave — declared: ‘This brings us to the only realistic option, which is to stay within the EEA agreement. The EEA is

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

What’s it like to talk at length to a serial killer?

‘I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t appreciate being listened to, being taken seriously,’ said Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian homicide detective who one afternoon in the summer of 2011 found himself listening to Anders Breivik, who had just killed 77 people in a shoot-out on an island near Oslo. His job, Rachlew explained, was to get Breivik to talk, but not ‘by faking it, through manipulation etc.’. You have to show real concern, he said, to get the information you need, because you have to remember that suspects, too, like Breivik, are also traumatised. ‘Banging the table and screaming etc. doesn’t help communication…’ Rachlew’s frankness, his plain speaking, as

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Europe’s ever-looser union

Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different spectre has crept up on their other flank: which is that even if the UK votes to stay in the EU in 2017, we might be one of the only countries left. It’s a radical thought, but if they’d like to consider it, the Europhiles should look at what is happening across the continent. Pro-EU countries are proving harder and harder to find. The eastern European countries may still be financial net receivers, but they are now having to weigh up their honey pot against the demands that come with

Tuesday

Matthew Plummer

Yvette Cooper needs to do more than just talk about Nordic models

Britain’s Left has been indulging in worship of Scandinavian social democracy ever since the tide started ebbing on the New Labour project, most recently on prostitution reform and the SNP’s vision for an independent Scotland. Thinking wistfully of Borgen beats the hard work of actually reinventing socialism, but I haven’t heard so much excited talk about the ‘Nordic Model’ since I was at school and Helena Christensen was practically everywhere. Happy memories indeed. Last month Yvette Cooper announced that one of the pillars of her leadership bid would be childcare: campaign[ing] for universal childcare – as other countries, including Scandinavia, have. That means breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, holiday clubs and free nursery places

Friday

Camilla Swift

Norway hasn’t given in to Islamophobia – but it has reacted

Under the headline ‘Norway didn’t give into Islamophobia, nor should France’, Owen Jones writes on the Guardian’s Comment is free website that Norway’s response to the Anders Breivik massacre in 2011 ‘was not retribution, revenge, clampdowns’, and that ‘the backlash [Breivik] surely craved never came’. Norway, he writes, ‘stood strong’. But did it really? I’m half Norwegian. I adore the country, and I would – and do – fight its corner any day of the week (even against our Swede-loving editor). Norway certainly hasn’t given in to Islamophobia, but it has reacted. No matter what Owen Jones says, there have been some changes in the Norwegian public’s general attitudes. In

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Cognac and the Viking connection in la France profonde

The chestnut trees were still resplendent in yellow leaf along the banks of a misty autumn river on its glide through woodlands, pasture, comfortable towns — and vineyards. This was the Charente. Eighty years ago, before the lorry became dominant, it would not have been so peaceful. In those days, barges laden with barrels of Cognac made their way along this river to the coast to be shipped all over the world. Wine has been grown in Cognac for centuries and exported since the Middle Ages. But it was always inferior to the products of Bordeaux, to the south-west. Even so, its acidity and low alcohol content made it ideal

Thursday

Richard Cork

We must never again let this 19th century Norwegian master slip into oblivion

You won’t have heard of Peder Balke. Yet this long-neglected painter from 19th-century Norway is now the subject of a solo show at the National Gallery. And it’s an absolute revelation. Walking around, I marvelled at the intensity of a man obsessed with revealing the frozen grandeur and elemental drama dominating his country’s northernmost shores. Like Turner, he was driven by a restless urge to travel, discovering landscapes that enlarged and transformed his vision of the world. In 1832 he took an arduous sea journey to the far north of Norway, ceaselessly sketching the rugged coast and mountains along the way. His excitement grew as he passed the primal North

Thursday

Radek Sikorski

Radek Sikorski’s diary: Show Putin what you think of him – eat a Polish apple

I made a welcome escape from sweltering Warsaw to the cloudy cool of Bodø, halfway up the coast of Norway, north of Iceland. Bodø’s harbour stays ice-free all year round only thanks to the Gulf Stream. The fjords bubble with whirlpools and offer some of the best cold-water scuba diving in the world. When the mist clears, the air in this visibly prosperous place has an Alpine, colour-enhancing quality. It’s my first time beyond the Arctic circle and the dusk through the night makes it hard to sleep. ‘Now imagine,’ says the wife over the phone from Washington, ‘what it was like to try to go to sleep in a

Thursday

Paul Binding

The making of a novelist

Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged 13, because of his father’s higher-grade teaching appointment on the mainland. As they drove over the bridge linking the island with the southern Norwegian port of Arendal, ‘it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that… the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good.’ Only in a literal sense did they disappear. And the six-volume autobiographical novel sequence, My Struggle, on which Knausgaard embarked after the success of his first two books, demanded

Thursday

John Preston

Why are Scandinavians so happy when they should be so sad? 

As I sit here in my Sarah Lund Fair Isle sweater, polishing my boxed sets of Borgen and nibbling on a small piece of herring, it briefly occurs to me that perhaps I too have fallen victim to the prevailing mania for all things Scandinavian. Just about the only person who’s stayed resistant, it seems, is Michael Booth, the author of this book. At home in Copenhagen — he’s married to a Dane — watching the incessant drizzle falling through the perpetual twilight, Booth begins to think he’s losing his mind. How come every survey ever commissioned into human happiness puts the Scandinavians at the top of the list?, he

Thursday

Sarah Drury

The grandson of Scott’s deputy makes music in Antarctica

As his father lay dying some six years ago, Julian Broke-Evans promised him that he would ‘keep telling the story’, the story being that of Scott’s ill-fated but heroic 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Julian’s grandfather was Teddy Evans (later Admiral Lord Mountevans), Scott’s second-in-command, who was to win fame in 1917 as ‘Evans of the Broke’ when he took on six German destroyers in the Dover Straits. Marrying a Norwegian, he embraced the land of Scott’s rival, Amundsen, with an enthusiasm that has passed down the generations and which is now inspiring an Anglo–Norwegian collaboration of rare beauty, set on a mountain-top above Gudbrandsdalen. Julian, who

Friday

Camilla Swift

Crime fiction at Easter? Look no further than our Scandinavian neighbours

If you thought that winter in Britain had gone on long enough this year, then spare a thought for the Norwegians. Winters in Norway are famously long, dark and bitter, and – for those who experience them year upon year – can be incredibly boring. During one such winter, in February 1923, two Norwegians called Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie decided to alleviate their boredom by writing a book. The theme? A train robbery; or more specifically, a looting of the train to Bergen. The title of the book? The Bergen train was robbed in the night (or, in its original Norwegian: Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). Having written the book,

Monday

Alex Massie

Britain, Scotland, Norway and Europe: lands of magical Sovereignty-Unicorns – Spectator Blogs

Even the cheapest, Poundland crystal ball will tell even a blind observer that Europe is pretty soon going to be a pretty hefty problem for almost all of Britain’s political parties. Almost all, I say, because that includes the SNP* whose europhilia is, in some respects, a product of a time that no longer exists. Anyway, the odds of manifesto pledges promising an in-or-out referendum in the next parliament seem to be shortening all the time. I have no idea what this is supposed to achieve since, as best I understand the matter, neither the Conservative nor Labour parties wish Britain to leave the European Union. Asking the question necessarily

Friday

James Forsyth

The EU wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Today is not April the first; but the European Union has indeed won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a bizarre decision given what is going on in Europe right now. Watching the reaction of the Greek crowd to Angela Merkel on her visit there this week, it was hard not to worry that the European project was now a threat to peace and stability on the continent. To be sure, France and Germany have not gone to war again since 1945. But to chalk that up solely to the European Union is a profound misreading of history. I suspect that the decision to award the prize to the European

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Want to know what tax transparency looks like? Look at Norway

If you take George Osborne’s plan for tax transparency to its natural conclusion, where do you end up? The answer is Norway, where details of every taxpayer’s annual income, wealth and annual tax return are publicly available — and it’s not a new thing. Norwegian tax returns have been publicly available since the 1800s, the idea being that financial transparency is seen a vital part of social democracy. Figures were traditionally released every October in a Yellow Pages-style book, available for anyone to read at the local town hall or tax office. As the internet evolved, they decided to take things online. The government initially came up with the idea

Monday

Mats Persson

Rudd’s straw man argument about our EU membership

As the isolation hysteria over Cameron’s EU veto starts to fade, attention is now shifting to the more existential question of what kind of relationship the UK should have with Europe. In a piece for today’s Times (£), the chairman of Business for New Europe, Roland Rudd — who, incidentally, used to argue passionately in favour of the UK joining the euro — takes aim at those who want Britain to replicate a Norway-style model of European cooperation. Arguing that Norway endures so-called ‘fax machine diplomacy’ — no influence over EU laws that it must nonetheless accept — Rudd says that ‘the choice now is to do what Norway does,

Monday

Alex Massie

Is Scotland a Nordic Country?

This is a question that meets the classic definition of John Rentoul’s famous-to-them-that-ken series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No. That is, the people asking the question think the answer is Yes when in fact it is No. This question, like many of the SNP’s other witticisms, is the brainchild of Angus Robertson, the MP for Moray who might be thought Alex Salmond’s answer to Karl Rove. Like Rove, Angus sometimes gets carried away and this suggestion that Scotland is some long-lost Nordic appendage is one of those occasions. Not that he’s alone in wishing Scotland could be redefined in this fashion. Lesley Riddoch had a piece in