Sweden

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

League of nations: the race out of lockdown

Uppsala Last week, Europe started its liberation from lockdown — and it all feels like a study in national political identity. Belgium took its first step towards ‘deconfinement’ but no one seems exactly sure what that means. France is opting for complexity rather than simplicity. Italy’s national plan for the easing of its lockdown is more convoluted still, but few regions bother to follow it anyway. Spain, goes a national joke, went more slowly and started with a reopening of the siesta. And in Germany, everyone is praising the country’s scientific approach to the pandemic, but as soon as they were allowed to roam freely again, many Germans headed for

Thursday

Toby Young

Professor Lockdown’s spell has been broken

I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London seemed to have bewitched successive prime ministers, blinding them with his brilliance. Whenever a health emergency broke out, whether it was mad cow disease or avian flu, there he was, PowerPoint in hand, telling the leaders of the country what to do. And they invariably fell into line. In 2001, after the outbreak of foot and mouth, his team at Imperial advised Tony Blair’s government to adopt a strategy of pre-emptive culling, leading to the slaughter of more than six million animals. Gordon Brown consulted him about swine

Wednesday

Johan Giesecke

Does lockdown really decrease Covid deaths?

It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes – a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from Covid-19, which is evident when comparing the UK’s experience with that of other European countries. PCR testing and some straightforward assumptions indicate that, as of April 29, 2020, more than half a million people in Stockholm county, Sweden (which is about 20–25 per cent of the region’s population) have been infected. 98 to 99 per cent of these people are probably unaware or uncertain of having had the infection; they either had symptoms that were severe,

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Sweden tames its ‘R number’ without lockdown

Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of

Thursday

David Paton

The dangers of comparing different countries’ death rates

Using differences in coronavirus death rates between countries to draw out policy conclusions is becoming a very popular pastime. Unfortunately, as Michael Baum has pointed out already in The Spectator, it is rarely a productive one. Over the weekend, Dr Elaine Doyle of the University of Limerick tried her hand, arguing that high death rates in the UK relative to Ireland reflected badly on the UK policy approach to tackling the virus. At the time of writing, the UK has reported 12,868 hospital deaths of coronavirus patients, a rate of about 193 per million, while the Republic had reported 435 hospital deaths, a much lower rate of about 89 per million. But the UK

Saturday

The Spectator

How much are people eating during lockdown?

People power Boris Johnson said that the reaction to the coronavirus crisis showed ‘There really is such a thing as society’ — an apparent reference to an interview Mrs Thatcher gave to Woman’s Own in 1987. A reminder of what she actually said: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people,

Fredrik Erixon

No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish

Uppsala Who would have thought that Sweden would end up being the last place in Europe where you could go for a beer? We have, in our normalcy, suddenly become an exotic place. Other countries are closing their cities, schools and economies, but life in our corner of the world is surprisingly ordinary. Last weekend I went to the gym, met up with friends, and sat in the spring sun at outdoor cafés. My foreign friends are stunned. They can’t fathom that there are still people enjoying the fruits of civilisation, as if the natural reaction to pandemics is to embrace totalitarianism. And they wrestle with another conundrum: how on

Thursday

Paulina Neuding

Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life

 Stockholm Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the crime statistics One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries this time, just the usual shattered windows, scattered debris and shocked people woken by the blast. The police bomb squad was already on its way to the first explosion in the district of Vaxholm when it had to turn around and prioritise the detonation at a residential building in the more densely populated city centre. Residents whose doors had been deformed by the shock wave had to be rescued. The third target (seemingly

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Meet the folks

Midsommar is the latest horror film from Ari Aster, who made Hereditary, which starred Toni Collette and was a sensation. That was a domestic, claustrophobic scenario packed with jump scares — well, jump-ish scares; I wasn’t that scared, actually — whereas this is pastoral and relies more on building a quiet dread. It’s set in the remote countryside where a pagan community has its own superstitions and rituals and ‘elders’ and a maypole — and they are never good news, maypoles. This is clever and gripping in its own right, but it is also familiar and will certainly put you in mind of The Wicker Man. That is, the 1973

Tuesday

Marcus Cadier

Why the green wave didn’t hit Sweden

The European parliament election campaign in Sweden was unlike any other in its history, characterised by several scandals and conflicts amongst individual candidates – both within and between the major parties. The elections in Sweden – as elsewhere – were also an ideological struggle between parties calling for more or less EU integration. But perhaps surprisingly, the green wave witnessed in other countries around Europe didn’t hit Sweden. Swedish voters largely opted for parties who called for the EU to have less influence. Compared to 2014, the results of the election rewarded centre-right parties who expressed soft Euroscepticism – seeking EU reform while remaining firmly in favour of continued membership.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

What does an illegal migrant have to do to get deported from Sweden?

There is an old paradox/joke about the law of averages. If the likelihood of getting on a plane with a bomb on it is (say) one in one hundred million, and the likelihood of getting on a plane with two bombs on it is (say) one in 20 billion, then the safest way to travel is to carry a bomb. Like many other newly ‘diverse’ societies, Sweden keeps supplying the world with paradox-jokes of its own. How about this one:  Question: ‘What is the best way to stay safe in Sweden?’ Answer: ‘Burn down a synagogue.’ Unfortunately this joke is being tested on a nation, in real-time. I refer to the

Tuesday

Fredrik Erixon

Sweden’s PM is out – but for how long?

If Theresa May feels a bit disoriented and lonely – under pressure from her own friends in parliament – she could take some comfort in that she isn’t trying to run a government in Sweden. The country’s election delivered an inconclusive result. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and his red-green coalition government lost a lot of its support, but the four-party centre-right alliance didn’t win many new souls. No side commands a majority – or something remotely close to it. The only parties that made substantial gains were those that no other party wants to take into government – the extreme left and the populist-nationalist Sweden Democrats. This morning the new

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 September 2018

Home Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, was said to want to throw a lifeline to Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, but he insisted: ‘It is not possible to get freedom for goods without freedom for services, in particular for the movement of people.’ Up to 80 Tory MPs would vote against the government’s plan hatched at Chequers in July, Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, said. A few dozen members of the European Research Group met to see how they might make best use of rules on Conservative leadership election. The Trades Union Congress said it could throw its ‘full weight’ behind a referendum on the final

Monday

Fraser Nelson

The new Swedish lesson: populism can be kept at bay by listening to voters | 10 September 2018

The world’s press was all geared up to write “Rabble-rousing Sweden Democrat breakthrough” but Sweden’s voters have not obliged. The populists were aiming for first place, but remain in third place, behind the conservatives. The Christian Democrats (led by Ebba Busch Thor, pictured, above) and the Centre Party gained more seats between them (16) than the Sweden Democrats did (13 seats, to a total of 62). The governing Social Democrats had their worst result for decades, but have still ended up the largest party by far. Swedes woke up to find parliament looking like this:- V: LeftParty (ie, former Communists). S: Social Democrats. MP: Greens. SD: Sweden Democrats (in the middle because

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Sweden leaders’ debate shows how far language over immigration has moved

Sweden’s general election campaign ended with the Sweden Democrats in a huff and boycotting SVT, the state broadcaster, because it issued a statement distancing itself from comments made by Jimmie Åkesson in the leaders’ debate that it broadcast. Having a supposedly neutral state broadcaster pass judgement is the perfect gift for Åkesson, who said it demonstrates an establishment stitch-up and institutional bias. But actual debate itself offered a fascinating glimpse into how much the debate has shifted in Sweden – with leaders of all parties offering immigration-related facts that make a British listener gasp. We had seven party leaders, most of whom expressing views that they’d have denounced as racist not so

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The Swedish Prime Minister has gambled with his country’s future

The Swedes are going to the polls in one of the most significant bellwether-elections in Europe this year. The international press has been taking an unusual interest in these elections because the Sweden Democrats look set to do fairly well, perhaps coming second if not first. Readers of The Strange Death of Europe will know that I spent some time with members and leaders of that party during research for the book. Nothing that has happened since then (summer 2016) has changed the way I view the party or the political establishment’s attitudes towards it. However, one thing that has happened on the eve of this election could easily have

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Are the Sweden Democrats far-right? Jimmie Akesson interviewed

In the newspapers today, there is much talk of Sweden turning to the ‘far-right.’ The Times has a picture of skinhead nutters on the march, giving the impression that Swedes are about a day away from goose-stepping down Drottninggatan. The myth of Sweden going all Nazi is a myth that’s hard to puncture because no one has a good word to say about the Sweden Democrats, who are hoping to finish first. They’ll not end up in government, because no one would enter coalition with them. But their electoral success baffles the outside world. There is no agreed definition of “far-right” and the term is lazily used: dramatic, but serves to cloud understanding

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Spectator Podcast: The people vs Brexit

The clamours for a second referendum are growing. But are those calling for a ‘people’s vote’ really interested in what voters think? Or is this just a plot to stop Brexit? Rod Liddle isn’t convinced about the case for giving voters a second say. The vote to leave the EU was unequivocal, he says in this week’s cover piece. So why won’t the luvvies just accept it and move on? Rod is joined on this week’s Spectator podcast by James McGrory, executive director of ‘People’s Vote’ and Tom Slater, deputy editor of Spiked Online. On the podcast, Rod says: ‘It seems to me that the People’s Vote people are simply reiterating the same

Fredrik Erixon

Sweden ablaze

 Uppsala, Sweden When I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told me, ‘but how can I explain this to my young kids?’ As Sweden goes to the polls next weekend, its politicians face another conundrum: how do they explain all this to the country? I live in Uppsala, a leafy and prosperous university town north of Stockholm. Around Gothenburg, the attacks have been far more dramatic:

Monday

Douglas Murray

The real lesson of a Swedish deportation protest | 27 August 2018

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space about the case of Elin Ersson. She is the young Swedish woman who caused adulatory headlines around the world when she stood up on an airplane and refused to sit down until an Afghan man was taken off the flight. Not that Ersson is some awful racist. Far from it, in her own eyes. Ms Ersson refused to be on the same place as the Afghan man because the Afghan man was being deported from Sweden and Ms Ersson wanted to stop this from happening. In her own words (filmed on her own phone, natch) the man was being sent to