I don’t know for certain whether “Erik Thure” refers to Thure Erik Lund, the Norwegian cult novelist a decade Knausgård’s senior, but this advice rang in my ears while reading Lund’s The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, recently translated by David M. Smith, and the first of Lund’s works to appear in English. Lund, along with Knausgård and playwright-novelist Jon Fosse, makes up a trio of Norwegian writers having an outsized impact on world literature. The “story” that Lund tells — through the increasingly crazed but enlightened voice of his alter-ego narrator — is of a rambling and mostly plotless kind. Yet it is, at the same time, a “mystery” story in the old sense, one that summons the greatest questions and doubts about ourselves, one that against all the apparent odds, excites, rocks, and compels the reader as few novels can. At stake is the value — and the danger — of intellectualism. 

Lund has published more than a dozen books, both fiction and essays, the most recent being Identitet, in 2017. Ditch was first published in 1999, and is the first in a sequence of novels that have marked Lund’s distinctive place in Norwegian letters, all revolving around the central figure of character Tomas Olsen Myrbråten. Knausgård has called Lund the “greatest Norwegian contemporary writer.” It is a crowded field, a generation that has also produced not only the global success of Knausgård’s own autofictional project, but also the slow international rise and then sudden peak of Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Knausgård’s praise alone — he calls Lund “the most vital writer I know” — should send the curious out to pick up a novel that is quite unlike anything else. 

This trio can reasonably be said to have pushed the novel into new territory –– whether it’s Knausgård’s aforementioned series of autofictions, Proust-rivaling in scope and capacity for detail, which is (or ought to have been) the absolute and closing statement of that form; or Fosse’s lyrical inner-monologue narratives (culminating in Septology) of drifting souls in rural, seaside Norway, like a Beckett reborn with more warmth and less humor. And then there’s Lund, whose work was previously called “untranslatable” by Knausgård, who carries a political charge and confrontational energy and engages in wild linguistic play.

Suggested reading

Liberalism's war on religious families

By Arash Azizi

The novel opens with what is, in essence, a dramatic device: the name of our narrator, Myrbråten, is placed directly before his monologuing voice begins to speak. It only happens once, but here Lund is subtly distancing himself and a character who might be taken to be a mouthpiece — one whose initials (T.O.M.) also happen to spell out the word for “empty” in Norwegian. “It is no longer me who cries,” Tomas says in his opening remarks, “but the world, the world crying, in me.” So, Tomas both is and isn’t speaking, just as he both is and isn’t a character. Something is instead being summoned — perhaps it is simply an ambiguous indeterminacy, an empty space through which truths might escape.

Yet the voice of Tomas will be our sole guide to the strange and increasingly twisted story. It is a voice that is by turns urbane, offhand, stonily sincere, unceasingly ironic, unhesitating, rambling, repetitious, revelatory, lost, driving forward and always unpredictable. It tells a story without a single true line of dialog or more than a handful of scenes — although many of those come out viscerally, hauntingly well — moving in long, loping paragraphs. With the voice’s totalizing consciousness, Lund reminds us just how strong the influence of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard has been on fiction in the past 30 years or so.

Tomas tells us that he spends daily a “couple long, drawn-out hours at the kitchen table crying. Nothing more than this utterly miserable business: to sit slumped across the table, crying over the awfulness of the world.” A rictus grin is firmly established from the outset. Lund spends his first 50 or so pages in what is essentially a mode of relentless belligerence. It’s like reading a castoff by the Unabomber, a viscerally satisfying, disturbing, and startlingly prescient screed against what Tomas terms “the new, synthetic state of nature,” “the modern science-and-technology-based industrial society,” the “info-technological world-machine,” and “the new narcoticism” that underpins all of it. 

On virtually every page of this heady first section Tomas reminds us that his central problem, both a curse and a blessing, is that of being a “life-of-the-mind individual” in the midst of an increasingly world-consuming “technonarcoticist culture.” “Life-of-the-mind individuals,” he declares, are “characterized by the fact that everything they do, they do because they must.” And this condition, in a world ever more under the machinic impulse of “money’s representative unreality,” comes to resemble an affliction, a pathology. For at the same time “we [life-of-the-mind individuals] have no choice but to believe, to believe in the good. In our time, this is hell.”

The novel’s story, then, such as it is, is Tomas’s transformation. As a frustrated writer, his concerns have, rather improbably, found “sudden manifestation in the form of a long essay assignment, a so-called cultural-historical think piece, commissioned by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture.” It is while he is working on what he repeatedly and snidely dubs his “think piece” — which is to be all about “the problem of cultural relics” in Norway — that “I set off on some trips around the country. And the more I traveled, the more disastrous Norway appeared to me, the more perverted.” 

Lund’s unfolding, eviscerating critiques of his homeland could easily be transferred to any country you care to name, as the hollowing forces of global capital combine year on year to make every place resemble every other place, and each place into all the same kind of “neo-fictive Globoland.” Norway, or at least an essential “Norwegianness” is being turned into a commodity for tourism and a friendly, globalized image, while folk cultures and once-alive communities become “cultural relics” to be transformed into money, all on the way to being replaced by “GloboNorway.” 

Like Lund, Tomas was raised in the country but has matured in the city; concern over the clash between urban and rural and that false divide between “nature” and “culture” drives him to conclude his road trips with a return to his home village. And it’s here that the book’s second part takes place; Lund moves also into a new terrain of language, a kind of contrived country-speak for which Smith, the translator, turned to his upbringing in the American South for a Twainian-Faulknerian equivalent. It’s disorienting, at first. Then it’s hilarious. And finally disturbing. 

Tomas seeks a return, back beyond his intellectualizing conditioning in the city, to a pure harmony with “nature” — first in the village, then, when that goes wrong, up in the strange, surreal and somehow out-of-time realm of “Graygrizzle Flats” under the influence of an Austrian archaeologist-inventor named Walter, where a cult-like group of archaic religious fanatics still dwell; finally, he’s cast out of there, too, and ends up in the final section as a truly de-civilized man: “the Forest Outlaw.” 

And yet the real story Lund seems to be telling must be experienced, first and foremost, through his delight in language and a simultaneous, deep distrust of its power over us. As Smith explains in his translator’s afterword, “life-of-the-mind individual” is his considered rendering of the original Norwegian word which Lund used, åndsmenneske, which any dictionary would normally translate simply as “intellectual” in English. But the Latinate smoothness of this choice (not to mention, perhaps, a certain cultural baggage around the term that suggests, at least to me, an old-fashioned, somewhat midcentury frame of reference) would have lost the essence of the original Norwegian word, which Smith writes has “deep roots.” With åndsmenneske, you have ånd (mind, spirit) plus menneske (person, human). In Lund’s writing, moreover, “the word itself becomes defamiliarized” through Tomas’s constant, ironically repetitive, use of it. Smith’s choice here was a typically good one –it carries, semantically and sonically, the sense of an inherent awkwardness.

Suggested reading

The return of the great American exile novel

By Valerie Stivers

What help might language provide for the sorrowful intellectual, writhing against the increasingly tight confines of the Globo-culture?

Throughout Ditch, Lund writes restlessly in pursuit of linguistic invention, the kind that Anglo fiction seems to have largely abandoned. He employs neologisms, word compounds, and long, rhythmic sentences. The capacity for compound words in Norwegian allows for playful flexibility: some favorite renderings are “problemscapes” and “ennothingment.” And the constant clash and switch between “oral” and “literary” registers also enlivens Lund’s prose’s flow, rendering it at once thrillingly improvised and totally controlled. Such a contradiction, of course, mirrors Tomas’s predicament: he uses language to free himself, yet his prison is made up of it.

The reader might take joy, and some hope for the future from the virtuosity on display here, both Lund’s and Smith’s. Any good translator will actively embrace the innate and irreconcilable differences between the two languages with which they are working. Smith has achieved that — it’s a long time since I came away from any English-language fiction published in the past quarter century with this much excitement in its “vocabulations,” to steal another of Smith’s renderings, still less found myself reeling afresh at the latent energies of language from any contemporary novel. Smith’s work on Lund is a triumph of wit and invention. 

At the same time, Ditch is centrally concerned with the great dangers of language: the ways it is at once indispensable and deadly to the human, to our sense of being. As AI is making clear, mistaking language’s representations for realities — and equating language processes with “intelligence” and “truth” — has unfortunate, and even perhaps insane, consequences. 

For this and many more reasons, Thure Erik Lund is a writer we are lucky to have been given in English at this moment. His work will probably not be embraced by as wide a public as Knausgård’s, or indeed Fosse’s, has been. But this clause-cramped and wild-eyed novel has made me feel freer inside, and we need more of that. So, we must hope David M. Smith finishes the untranslatable task he has started, and gives us the rest of Tomas Olsen Myrbråten’s adventures.

But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

More from this author

The cursed outposts of America's empire

By Lily Lynch

The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

The genius of the film, by the celebrated Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, is that it poses these questions without ever forcing simple, didactic answers.

Early on in the story, we know evangelical Christianity is going to be a theme. We hear a Norwegian rendition of “Amazing Grace” sung at a church gathering, and we learn the origin story of the film’s lead couple: the Norwegian Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) was on a humanitarian Christian mission in Romania when she met Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan). They now have five kids together and, after years of living in Bucharest, have moved to Lisbet’s picturesque hometown in western Norway, where Mihai takes a job as a technician at the local school.

The couple’s Christian mores soon draw censure from many in the local community. The kids go to church every Sunday and study the Bible every day using a points-based system (you lose points if you misbehave or forget your daily portions). Unlike their peers, the Gheorghiu children aren’t allowed to use YouTube, dance, or own smartphones. Clashes erupt, both at the school and between Gheorghius and their next-door neighbors, the Halsbergs, with whom they have a complex relationship.

Suggested Reading

The terror of the aged woman

By Justin Lee

Mats Halsberg (Markus Tønseth), who had initially made a point of warmly welcoming the family, is discomfited by their Christianity (he forbids Mihai from playing “Amazing Grace” on the piano at the local school where he works, even without the words). But his Swedish wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), whose outsider perspective perhaps renders her more understanding, gets along with Lisbet, who joins her in taking care of Mats’s wheelchair-bound father, Ake. The children get along, too. Elia Gheorghiu (Vanessa Ceban) forms a particularly close relationship with Noora Halsberg (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), a teenage rebel whose wild ways are in sharp contrast to Elia’s obedience to the Almighty and her parents.

We might expect an arthouse European film to indict the conservative Christian family at its center, mocking the members’ backwardness and showing their dark side. Mungiu himself has a venerable history of confronting religious obscurantism. His Palm-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) tackled the draconian anti-abortion laws in Romania. Beyond the Hills (2012) portrayed an Orthodox convent accusing two women in an intimate relationship of being possessed. R.M.N. (2022), too, paints a picture of a local church in Romania as a regressive institution.

But Fjord takes us on a wholly different path. When officials at the school notice bruises on Elia and her brother, they act swiftly and bring in Norway’s famously zealot Child Welfare Services. Within a day, all five children (even a still-nursing infant) are taken away from the family and placed in foster care. The film thus becomes a courtroom drama, as the Gheorghius throw all they have at a chance to get their children back.

Without surrendering to didacticism or painting a heroic picture of the family, the film gently takes the Gheorghius’ side, pointing out the gaping hypocrisies of the supposedly progressive Norwegian host society. The progressive townspeople, the film suggests, are animated by prejudice: against religious devotion, against the traditional mores of Romanian society.

We live in the age of self-righteous ideological silos, in which partisans of one side don’t bother to learn much about those of the other, often making do with cartoonish views of them. Social progressives and Leftists must be familiar with this phenomenon, having long critiqued the act of “othering” minorities. But liberals and Leftists can be equally prone to “othering” minorities they don’t approve of, as Fjord shows.

The film doesn’t sugarcoat the Gheorghius. Portrayed stoically and firmly by Stan, Mihai is not a particularly likable character, often appearing as dogmatic and mildly authoritarian. There is also no denying that the Gheorghius use corporal punishment as a routine part of parenthood, although the methods of discipline are never quite revealed. The specifics are lost in translation between three languages — English being the lingua franca between all sides — but it seems to be mild spanking, and certainly nothing harsh enough to leave bruises. Having seen how physical the games Noora plays with the kids are, we can assume those to be the cause for the bruises. Noora herself tells her parents as much.

With Mungiu’s typically masterful storytelling, the film shows us all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the Norwegian progressives harbor prejudice toward these newcomers, because they are the “wrong” type of immigrants, the “wrong” type of minorities. The school is happy to hold formulaic and anodyne celebrations of the indigenous Sami People. But faced with a different minority, it reacts very differently. Any mention of the Bible at school is taken to be verboten “evangelizing,” which seems less like separation of church and state and more like the state enforcing certain ideas and barring others.

The prejudicial treatment also mars the courtroom proceedings. A teacher testifying about the bruises casually lets slip that it’s normal for children to have bruises at that age, since “they are children after all.” It is thus not the bruises-as-evidence, but a very pointed reading of them that impelled the school to act against the family. The prosecutor, meanwhile, uses old Romanian proverbs to portray Mihai as prone to violence. The prosecutor’s assuredness of being right in his viewpoint smacks of the sort of absolutism for which progressives usually reproach the religious Right. At several points during the proceedings, Mihai seems to be on trial for his religious beliefs, not whether he has smacked his children. The family’s mere taking part in church services — fraternizing with the wrong kind of locals —  is treated as suspicious in court. Only certain forms of “integration,” it seems, are approved for immigrants.

The film also tries to show how the supposed progressives are blind to shortcomings on their own side and virtues of the other. Banning YouTube might be draconian, but can anybody argue that unrestricted access to social media and smartphones has been great for kids? We see how the Halsbergs are clueless about parenting Noora (whose shenanigans include faking a suicide by gently cutting her wrist, jumping out of windows, and dangerously taking out boats at all hours of the night). Lisbet’s devoted caring for Ake achieves what the secular experts have failed to do: getting him to talk after long days of dementia-induced silence. Perhaps the Gheorghius have something to teach their new society.

Even so, the film can’t be read as a sign of Mungiu turning to the Right. Nor is this film an indictment of liberalism. In fact, if liberalism is to be defined as a philosophy of individual rights, due process, and tolerance of difference, Fjord stands as a vindication of liberal philosophy. It criticizes the illiberalism of the Norwegian system (Mungiu says the film opposes all forms of “fundamentalism” and “extremism”).

Suggested Reading

A Left case for the Great Books 

By Valerie Stivers

At several points in the courtroom drama, we gasp at how little due process is observed. When the children are interviewed by the officials, there are no lawyers or psychologists present. The court that rules on the decision to take the kids has little institutional separation from the child-welfare agency. Even the lawyer acquired by the family seems too invested in the system to think it might have made a mistake. After one court session, she refuses to represent the Gheorghius. In this close-knit community, there seems to be an incestuous intimacy between various sources of authority, seriously undermining the principle of judicial independence.

The film’s real heroes, if you ask me, are some of the side characters. Mia, who holds a law degree but hasn’t practiced in ages, agrees to represent the family and works diligently on its behalf, despite grumbling by Mats. At a memorable moment in the trial, the prosecutor reminds her that she wouldn’t fare so well in a Christian conservative society. “If I were there, I’d defend minorities, too,” she says, showing a dedication to equality and individual rights that the uber-liberal prosecutor could learn from.

Then there is the budding friendship between Noora and Elia, which includes breaking all sorts of rules (Noora smuggles a phone to Elia, thus keeping in touch with her even when she is taken to a foster family). By painting a touching image of teenage amity between two girls from wildly different ideological backgrounds, Fjord arguably casts them as the real heroes. In treating each other as humans and friends first, they seem to rise above the ideological rifts that have ripped their community apart.

Mungiu’s film has now brought him his second Palm, making him one of the most decorated filmmakers alive. He is unquestionably the lodestar of Romanian New Wave, which in the past two decades has awed European and global cinema. The film inevitably will also be seen in an intra-European context. In the more than two decades since Romania joined the European Union, its people have encountered all manner of stereotypes. Here we see a Romanian auteur confidently critiquing Nordic political culture, by some lights the pinnacle of European civilization. His roots as a citizen of a formerly Stalinist country have endowed him with a healthy skepticism of state power. This year at Cannes, the fellow New Wave auteur Radu Jude did something similar with his Diary of a Chambermaid, offering acerbic satire in a story about a Romanian nanny working for a family of progressive French intellectuals in Bordeaux.

If these films can show us something, it is the value of a non-didactic cinema that doesn’t rush to confirm our priors, but pushes us to rethink them. It’s what art does best.

Despite contributing pretty insignificant amounts to state coffers, these levies have dominated the debate heading into Monday’s knife-edge general election. Labour, having ramped up these taxes during its four-year term, stands accused of driving away swathes of their super-rich along with the next generation of ambitious wealth creators. And now, in Britain, the Left is considering doing the same thing.

Borsch does not pay wealth tax herself. But she admits her eyes were opened to Norway’s stifling bureaucracy and over-regulation after buying a stake in a local hotel — surrounded by salmon-filled rivers and steep mountains — four years ago. “We need these entrepreneurs,” she says, arguing that taxes must be fair. “And we need billionaires too. We want people to live in the whole of Norway — but if we want to stimulate businesses, then it has to be made affordable for people.”

Norway, one of the planet’s most prosperous nations, is propped up by the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund thanks to its North Sea oil and gas. This cash, which supplies about one quarter of state revenues, ensures it has run a budget surplus every year this century — in sharp contrast to most other debt-laden Western nations and despite very heavy spending on benefits for its 5.5m citizens. All these energy riches, however, failed to prevent the current government, led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre, from driving up their supposedly “redistributive” wealth taxes, sparking an exodus of many of its richest and most ambitious citizens.

More From This Author

How Katrina saved New Orleans schools

By Ian Birrell

Annualized wealth taxes have been a feature of Norway’s tax system since the late 19th century — and despite ditching inheritance tax, the country has clung to the concept. Defenders of the tax system like to claim that Norway is just promoting equality with its progressive Scandinavian system. Yet in reality, it shows with striking clarity why these outmoded wealth taxes have been ditched in almost all developed countries that adopted them. They drive away the very rich, the risk-takers and the entrepreneurs — the lifeblood of any economy.

Even as Britain considers wealth taxes, eight of the 12 OECD countries using such imposts have abolished them since 1990 — including, in 2007, neighboring Sweden after IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and tennis champion Bjorn Borg joined their rich fleeing abroad. “It’s not sustainable to keep taxes that radically diverge from other countries,” said Sweden’s then-finance minister, Anders Borg. “Not if you want the money to stay in the country.” He hailed the move as “a step on the way back toward making Sweden an entrepreneurial society”. Kamprad was among those who returned home from tax exile.

The issue caught fire in Norway after Støre’s coalition ramped up capital gains tax three years ago from 31.64% to almost 38%, while bumping up the annual wealth tax. An individual with worldwide wealth of 1.76m krone (about £126,000) is taxed at 1% above this threshold, a rate that rises marginally on assets above 20m. At the same time the government — arguing that some of the richest citizens, since they had no income, paid no tax towards the wildly-generous Swedish welfare state — slashed rebates that lessened the load on corporate capital which, combined with raised taxes on dividends, effectively doubled wealth taxes for many business owners.

The problems are two-fold. First, it is easy for the highly-mobile super-rich to move — and at least 100 of Norway’s 400 top taxpayers have left, largely to Switzerland. About £30bn is estimated to be controlled by Norwegians living abroad — and the owners of half this wealth have moved out in the past four years. Second, entrepreneurs pay tax on the paper valuation of their assets, including any offices, factories or stock. This is a complex calculation for unlisted companies, especially challenging for fledgling firms since injections of capital are taken into account, regardless of profitability. As a result, they are often forced to take out cash or even sell assets in order to pay taxes — neither of which is good for growth.

Among the most prominent to leave as a result was Norway’s biggest taxpayer, the billionaire industrial tycoon Kjell Inge Røkke. His relocation to Lugano costs about £13m a year just in lost taxes. Tord Ueland Kolstad, a wealthy property and salmon farming investor, moved to Lucerne. “This was not what I wanted, but the toughened and increased tax rules of the current government means that I have no choice,” he told TV2, a Norwegian broadcaster. Meanwhile, Norway’s biggest bank has set up a special branch in Zurich and one tech innovator told me how he attended a recent party in Lucerne at which there were at least 200 Norwegian tax exiles. Like it or not, targeting fat cats comes with collateral costs.

One of the key figures in this debate is Fredrik Haga, the founder of a successful Norwegian start-up. Haga declared he was moving to Switzerland in a social media post that went viral after being shared by Elon Musk. Haga said that despite living in a two-bedroom flat in a cheaper area of Oslo, he would have had to pay significant wealth tax on the high “paper” valuation of his cryptocurrency data business, even when it was loss-making. “No politician ever told me how I’m supposed to pay the bill”, he said, later widening his attack onto the state’s spendthrift approach to “green virtue-signaling”. “I hope at least Norway can be a cautionary tale for other countries for how much of a self-inflicted wound taxing unrealized gains can cause,” he said last month.

Suggested reading

An Arctic war is coming

By Joe Shute

Experts agree that it is bad for long-term economic health, deterring investment while doing little for equality. “Realistically, this is a business tax, and thereby a tax on the country as a whole,” said Ole Gjems-Onstad, professor emeritus at the Norwegian Business School. Gjems-Onstad believes such measures are particularly harmful in the post-digital world. “The net wealth tax makes it impossible to scale up modern businesses that may run for years without making a profit but still be very valuable, as shown by a company such as Amazon. Swedish successes such as Klarna, Spotify and Skype are simply not possible in Norway.”

Inevitably, seeing the startling exodus, Støre’s government responded with the imposition of hefty exit taxes. “I was afraid they would lock us in,” said one entrepreneur who moved to Switzerland three years ago. “And once they have locked you in, they can keep raising it. It is a financial prison.” Professor Gjems-Onstad argues that this is the natural consequence of these fiscal measures. ‘‘If you have a net wealth tax, then you need an exit tax, since this is the only way to stop people from leaving,” he said. “The tax is dependent upon domicile. As long as you leave, the company can stay in Norway. So the advice for young entrepreneurs is to leave Norway before they are visible on the radar, before there is a third-party evaluation that has resulted in anyone investing in the company. The ambitious young go to Sweden.”

The belief is that in order to thrive, ambitious young Norwegians must leave the country. The view has been widely shared — and mocked — on social media in the run up to the election. Among those causing a stir was Christer Dalsbøe, founder of a tech startup. Dalsbøe performed a song that went viral, slamming high taxes and “insane” politicians. “Don’t come to Norway,/ We will tax you till you’re poor./ And when you have nothing left,/ We will tax you a little more,” he sang, sitting at a piano. Such videos, along with diatribes on TikTok and X, helped yield a shock result in this week’s mock election in Norwegian schools: the Right triumphed despite Labour’s slim lead in national polls. It suggests that the traditional Left-wing bias of teenagers is being eroded by the populist Right — a phenomenon seen in many other countries. “We’re going into the election on a platform of lower taxes and fees, more freedom within schools and perhaps the most important of all, a thicker wallet for all Norwegians,” said Simen Velle from the hard-Right Progress Party, which more than doubled its vote share over 2021 and backs the removal of wealth taxes. “I think most youth agree with all that.”

Not everyone does agree, however. One Left-wing party created a “wall of shame” showing images of all their wealthy fellow citizens who have moved abroad, while Store condemned the exodus in parliament. “When you’ve made your wealth in Norway, put your kids in school, benefited from the healthcare system, driven on the roads and reaped the rewards of its research, it’s a breach of the social contract,” he said. Yet Jens Stoltenberg, the finance minister, has called for a review of all Norwegian taxes, including on wealth, after the election — and if his party wins, he is expected to invite all main parties to participate.

As Sir Keir Starmer weighs up demands from union chiefs and Left-wing MPs to introduce similar taxes, even those who support such a regime advise caution. “If you want a wealth tax it requires a lot of information about individuals and companies, along with a very savvy tax authority and information system,” said Kristoffer Berg, a Norwegian economist and tax specialist at Cambridge University. “It is a very complicated tax to do well. I think Norway does it reasonably well, but there are still problems and loopholes in the assessments.” He declined to answer when I asked if he thought Britain had “a very savvy” tax information system.

The faults of wealth taxes are being discussed across Norweigan society. “Suddenly there are so many people engaged on this as an issue,” said Mathilde Fasting, an economist with Civita think tank. “People who do not pay wealth taxes have become much more interested. Many people think it is stupid. And this mood has grown because of the unfairness, since Norwegian companies end up paying much more than foreign ones. People ask: why should Norwegian companies pay more tax than foreign firms?” Like many economists, Fasting argues that wealth taxes can deter investment while doing little for equality. “If you take them away, you would get an increase in the Gini co-efficient that measures inequality of just 0.001%. This is negligible — especially in Norway, when you have such heavy spending on schools, healthcare, welfare systems and pensions.”

Norway shows the risks of playing with crude wealth taxes and adopting crowd-pleasing efforts to “soak the rich”, especially in Europe’s polarized political climate. A move that was intended to be a modest financial tweak to placate the Left has turned into a costly lesson for the country in capital flight, the mobility of the super-rich and the need to nurture precious wealth creators in this digital age. Given his stumbling government, Starmer might be tempted by such measures — but given the state of the struggling economy, this would be unwise. “This tax does nothing,” said Fasting. “I would advise your Labour party strongly against doing a wealth tax.”

The year is 2024, not 1994: if the ICC simply sticks to going after Africans on behalf of the West while Gaza is being flattened, most or all countries in Africa will simply pull out. The West, after all, is no longer the only game in town when it comes to international institutions, and the Brics organisation has gone from a mere acronym to a project dozens of countries are clamouring to join. Moral considerations on the parts of Karim Khan or others at the ICC are likely a factor as well, but the main dynamic is structural: if it continues to sit on its hands, the ICC as a bureaucracy will simply cease to exist.

The American political system has responded to this act of defiance with a collective howl of rage. Several senior members of Congress had already issued a letter, threatening all members of the ICC with severe sanctions. And afterwards they doubled down: family members of judges and workers became fair game, as senators proposed they be banned from the US.

There is, to put it bluntly, something truly suicidal in the American political class choosing this particular moment — the very worst imaginable — to try to prosecute a war against the ICC and international law in general. Its ammo stocks are almost depleted, it is facing a truly terrifying shortage of sailors, soldiers and marines, and it has a rickety, insufficient industrial base to keep even a 300-ship navy going. If the Americans once spoke softly and carried a big stick, today it’s more accurate to say they are yelling loudly while waving a twig around.

In and of themselves, these ICC prosecutions aren’t a particularly big danger to Israel, and certainly not to America. While many European nations would probably arrest Israeli officials with ICC warrants — Norway has already said it would — indictments against Americans are not forthcoming anytime soon, and arresting senior American figures would definitely be a step too far for a country like Norway or Belgium. But this ICC debacle is almost certain to inflame a much deeper, more intractable problem hidden inside the American body politic, one of which US politicians seem serenely unaware. Swiftly followed by riots, civil strife and even revolution, it is one of the most dangerous problems a society can have. Its name is the failure of mimesis.

Human cultures — like human languages — propagate between generations through a process of imitation. The Greek word “mimesis” means precisely that — imitation — though it should be understood more like “re-representation”, rather than mere copying. A person who studies classical music under the great masters and then composes his own magnum opus is not copying a sheet of music; he has absorbed the craft and the essence of the art form, and that allows him to compose something new. A child who learns to speak English from his parents will not speak exactly the same as they did — language shifts even within the span of a human lifetime — but through the act of mimesis, he is still the carrier of a living language.

None of the above is hard to understand, but the kicker here is that what goes for language or classical music also goes for societal and political norms. For a society to actually maintain basic function over time, the younger generations have to be brought into its values and mores, internalising them and making them their own. In normal times, this happens more or less automatically; a medieval peasant generally doesn’t have to spare a lot of thought to the question of whether his children will inherit proper peasant values or not.

In certain cases, however, mimesis breaks down completely. To take one example, peasant cultural mores that had been stable in Russia for hundreds of years started to rapidly break down towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The reasons were fairly straightforward: if you are no longer a peasant, but an industrial worker crammed into crummy tenement room with 12 other people, working in a dirty, dangerous factory for 14 hours a day, what use are those peasant values and mores? At that point, the moral and cultural universe inhabited by peasants in the countryside is neither something you’re in a position to successfully imitate, nor would it even do you any good if you did.

In America today, mimesis is rapidly breaking down for reasons that are fairly similar. The US gerontocracy came of age at a time when the US was by far the most dominant military force in the world, and tiny countries like Yemen couldn’t possibly hope to go up against the US Navy. This was an era when a rising tide lifted all boats, when the US was a haven of free-market economics, where there were jobs and opportunities to be had around every corner, and when most of the world genuinely looked up to America as a shining city on the hill. Housing was affordable, jobs were good and plentiful, and college didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

This world is simply nothing like the one faced by someone in their early-20s today. The US economy is now sluggish and stagnant. The military is undermanned, under-equipped and demoralised. Housing is horrifyingly expensive, mortgages are all but unaffordable to the average member of Gen Z, and steadily growing homeless camps are a feature of most large American cities.

Suggested reading

How Hamas became radical chic

By Jacob Howland

What this all adds up to is a situation very similar to the one facing the Russian migrants forced into the cities at the turn of the century. Back then, there was no longer enough land to be a peasant farmer, and the new world of smokestacks and overcrowded tenement buildings was one that their parents and grandparents could offer approximately zero meaningful guidance for. The old culture broke apart, and what replaced it, initially at least, was… nothing. When mimesis fails, when cultural transmission from one generation to the next breaks apart due to neglect or environmental strain, it deteriorates into a vacuum. And that vacuum often ends up being filled with very strange and violent things.

Which brings us back to the ICC, and the true danger of America’s response to Khan’s behaviour. Without even knowing what they’re doing, US political elites seem intent on forcing the total, catastrophic failure of mimesis within American society. They’ve hollowed out their own economy and exported most of their industries to China. They’ve presided over an economic transition that makes things such as “family values” a joke: what use are those when you can’t even afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment? Finally, they are now smashing up the political underpinnings that their own society rests on: if you teach all these kids that we in the West may have our faults, but we are on the side of human rights, it’s a very bad idea to declare war on the system of international law.

The issue here isn’t hypocrisy, it is the creation of a vacuum: kids who have been trying to imitate a culture supposedly based on respect for human rights and international law are simply going to stop bothering to do so if it becomes too obvious they’re being played for suckers. In area after area, politicians in the West are tearing up the floorboards inside the very building they live in and shoving it all into the fireplace, replacing those old norms and values with absolutely nothing.

Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and the other senators now baying for blood in the hunt on the ICC aren’t actually going to bother coming up with a new story, a new set of norms or values for younger Americans to try to imitate. They simply intend to smash the old, replace it with nothing, and then marvel as this produces what it has always produced: discord, violence and, ultimately, political rebellion.

In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.

Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.

Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.

A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.

Further reading

A heatwave isn't the end of the world

By Thomas Fazi

Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”

As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”

Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.

According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.

“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”

Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world’s most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date. 

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy

By Nick Cater

Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”

The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.

Albutt blasted their populist gimmicks, short-term stunts, botched spending cuts and the revolving door of 11 justice secretaries since the Tories took office in 2010, who “achieved nothing but decline” in the functioning of her sector. Her conclusion to the all-party group on penal affairs was stark: that politicians are failing inmates, staff and the wider public as they cram more and more people into “warehouses of despair, danger and degradation”.

It was a startlingly honest appraisal of how inadequate politicians played tribal games at the expense of a public service. As she ran through the failures of individual ministers, the Tories were, inevitably, at the receiving end. Yet she was scathing, too, about the Imprisonment for Public Protection regime, a callous legacy of New Labour that has left people with comparatively short sentences still behind bars 20 years later, despite the ditching of the policy more than a decade ago.

The core issue behind Albutt’s outburst is the soaring prison population, which has doubled since she was born 56 years ago. Our incarceration rates became the highest in Western Europe before the turn of the century, then kept on rising. Now we have 87,063 prisoners in England and Wales — and are predicted to hit 100,000 by the end of this decade. Each inmate costs an average of £47,000 a year, slightly more than the fees for Eton. Yet Albutt accused politicians of deceiving the public by promoting a myth that locking up more and more people for steadily longer terms makes society safer. “It’s a lie,” she said bluntly. “Prison does not work.”

Few voters really care about prisons, of course, nor will they shed any tears for convicts crammed into squalid cells. But we should heed Albutt’s warning as crime rises up the political agenda, both parties viewing it as an issue that could sway key voters in swing seats. The Government just delivered a raft of law and order pledges in its ‘crime week’, the latest in a series of dismal themed policy drives in a bid to win back support. Labour responded that ministers have lost control — a point underlined by the home secretary’s suggestion that police might like to tackle offences such as bike thefts and burglaries.

Yet while these politicians tussle to look tough, prisons expose how our democracy is floundering.  Sir Winston Churchill, who spent time in captivity during the Boer War, said treatment of criminals “is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. He argued forcefully against excessive use of sentencing, warning that it was hard to rehabilitate jailed convicts. He told the Commons during his brief time as home secretary “the first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons should be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all”.

Westminster has failed to heed this advice. New Labour passed 28 criminal justice bills and put one new offence on the statute book for every day they were in office over 13 years. Then the Tories ramped up sentencing so that the average length of a prison sentence increased by 55% over the past decade. Austerity forced the police to spend more time picking up pieces of other crumbling public services such as mental health and social care, while the percentage of crimes leading to a charge crashed. Only days after Albutt spoke to parliament, the Met Police chief Mark Rowley said his officers would no longer attend mental health emergencies.

But these problems run deep in our society. We know, for instance, that many prisoners come from broken families or chaotic backgrounds. We know they often struggle with issues such as addiction, autism, illiteracy, mental illness or learning disabilities. The House of Commons Justice Committee found seven in 10 prisoners may have mental health needs and that these can worsen behind bars: these MPs admitted prison can be “inappropriate” and “inhumane” for those with most severe psychological problems.

More from this author

Inside Britain's psychiatric nightmare

By Ian Birrell

Nor does this swamped, unloved system curb reoffending. Short sentences are especially damaging with 55% of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffending. During his stint as prisons minister, Rory Stewart dared to admit: “The best way of protecting the public is to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population, because people on community sentences are less likely to re-offend than people put in prison.” Yet only Scotland has introduced a presumption against use of such sentences.

If rehabilitation doesn’t work, how about deterrence? This was exposed as another myth by the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, which published a landmark review last year. The authors pointed out that few offenders knew much about sentencing policies while criminal acts tend to be spontaneous, often driven by anger, drink, drugs, or mental health episodes. “We note that some have argued it is time to accept that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society,” the study concludes drily.

These findings reinforce those of the Transform Justice think tank, which looked at assaults on health workers and police officers. Despite the penalty for these nasty crimes quadrupling over four years,, the number of recorded offences actually rose. “Most victims want the person who harmed them not to harm them or other people again,” said director Penelope Gibbs. “They don’t necessarily want their day in court or retribution. Unfortunately, more prison is unlikely to meet the needs of victims or reduce crime. A government that really cared about cutting crime, rather than simply winning headlines would reduce imprisonment.”

In the United States, even many conservatives have come to see that it makes no sense to keep locking up damaged citizens, whether on fiscal, redemptive, or simply criminal justice terms.  The “Right-on-Crime” movement, placing an emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment, started out in Texas before sweeping the Republican Party after both main parties agreed that locking up more and more people was a costly failure. This goes to show that even in such a divided country politicians can reach across the tribal chasm and shift the terms of public debate, leading to a dramatic 25% decline in prison populations since 2009.

Suggested reading

The murder trial that broke me

By Julie Bindel

As US advocates of reform have pointed out to me, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour than simply to slam them into crowded cells. But Labour — driven again by Blairites — senses Tory vulnerability on crime and has stolen a lead on this issue in polls. The Tories by contrast think voters can be persuaded Labour is “soft” on crime under a former director of public prosecutions while latching onto an issue that unites both traditional Tories and new Red Wall recruits .

What makes this even more depressing is that an alternative approach has been proven to work in a nearby nation. Norway had even worse recidivism rates than Britain three decades ago, with seven in 10 prisoners reoffending within two years of release. It had a justice system like our own: built on the concept of deterrence with offenders given long sentences in grim institutions. But instead of blundering on with failure, their leaders boldly switched course. They were rewarded with the world’s lowest recidivism rate, which sees only one in five prisoners reoffending.

The key was to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation. Offenders lose their liberty but are given the chance to change their lives. Prisons tend to be small to break up violent cultures and dotted around the country to keep inmates close to their families. Cells are basic but have televisions, computers, fridges, and showers. They offer facilities such as yoga, saunas, music studios, tanning beds, fitness rooms, car workshops and cooking classes. Guards and prisoners enjoy barbecues and play sport together — and in some units, up to half the officers are women. Above all, there is an emphasis on study and work to develop skills in preparation for freedom — not abandonment in overcrowded cells.

Halden Prison, set in a forest 60 miles south of Oslo, has been labelled the most humane prison in the world although it is a maximum-security institution holding 250 men convicted of the worst crimes. It cost £138 million to build, winning a design award for its minimalist style and efforts to minimise stress. Inmates have appeared on reality television shows and released music under the label Criminal Records. There are no guns or barbed wire on display — although prisoners are still locked up in their rooms at night.

The legacy of such intense focus on rehabilitation is that Norway now has fewer than half the number of prisoners per capita as Britain. But Norway’s strategy is not just about treating prisoners well: it is about keeping people out of prison as far as possible. During its period of reform, prison sentences were reduced. Life sentences were abandoned with a 21 year maximum — although this can be extended in five-year increments if there is perceived danger.

Although the average cost per head of such prisons is significantly higher than our own, it is estimated that rehabilitated offenders save the state about £110,000 per person in terms of law enforcement costs and lower benefits. Crime comparisons are hard given differences in data collection, but the European Crime Index puts Norway comfortably in the top half of safest nations while the UK comes close to the bottom, just above Italy, Sweden and Belarus. Yet our leaders refuse to shift path, spending an immense £3.8bn to push another 20,000 people into more of these “warehouses of despair, danger and degredation”.

This failure by Westminster has a catastrophic impact on the rest of society. Politicians need to display some courage and admit that our prison system does not work, does not deter crime and does not provide value for money. “It’s really very simple,” said one prison warden in Norway. “Treat people like dirt and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they’ll act like human beings.”

It is little-known that in 1642, the Scots-born King Charles I — increasingly desperate for resources to prosecute his war against parliament — asked his uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway, for military aid. In return, the Danes wanted the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and to “gain possession of Newcastle in pawn”. It was Northumbria’s lucrative coal trade that appealed. A large shipment of weapons and supplies duly arrived at Holy Island in September 1642, but it is unclear whether Charles ever paid his uncle back. The Danish king certainly didn’t seize the collateral on his loan.

Had he done so, there would have been a precedent. Holy Island was the site of a rather less peaceable Danish excursion in 793, when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne, possibly in retribution for Christian missionary activity in Scandinavia. They were undoubtedly also itching to get their hands on the great wealth of the Northumbrian church. “The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” lamented a Bishop of Lindisfarne, “stripped of all its furnishings, and exposed to the plundering of pagans.” The shock of this event cast a long shadow in the North East, perhaps partly explaining the overemphasis of Scandinavia’s influence on Northumbrian history, and its people.

True, the Viking raids are depicted in William Bell Scott’s great cycle of Northumbrian history murals at Wallington Hall, and Nordic influence can seemingly still be detected in Northumbrian speech. The similarities between the Scandinavian “gå hjem” and Northumbrian “gan yem” — both expressions meaning “go home” — seem obvious. The Dano-Norwegian word for barley, “bygg“, lives on in the name of Newcastle’s famous Bigg Market. These linguistic parallels might suggest Scandinavian roots, but such words are not so much a Viking import as an indication that Northumbria’s is a very conservative English dialect, which shares a common Germanic root with modern Danish. For the Angles that first settled in Britain, after the Romans left, came from Angeln, in the southern part of the Jutland peninsula, where the borders of Germany and Denmark now meet. These Angles established the kingdoms of Deira, centred in what is now Yorkshire, and then Bernicia, in what is now Northumberland and County Durham.

When the Vikings came along a few centuries later, they became infamous for raiding the North East coast. But the Norsemen only tended to settle further south, around the great city of Jorvik and into the Midlands. To this day, members of the Yorkshire Society recite a Declaration of Integrity, which asserts the traditional boundaries of Yorkshire, established by Halfdan Ragnarsson in 875AD. But to the North, the Anglo-Saxons centred on the old kingdom of Bernicia remained unconquered by the invaders (or at least not settled). It is certainly noticeable how all those Scandinavian “-thorpes”, “-thwaites” and “-bys” scattered across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire peter out at the river Tees. Here, the Anglo-Saxon “-worth” is more conspicuous: Backworth, Heworth, Killingworth. Indeed, for a time in the ninth and tenth centuries, the rump of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria between the Tweed and Tees may even have become a centre of resistance against the Vikings.

More from this author

The North East will rise again

By Dan Jackson

A teleological version of English history would have it that the mission to unify the patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was inevitable — first under Alfred and then his grandson Æthelstan, with the latter the first to call himself “King of the English”. But this unity did not long survive Æthelstan’s death in 939. For Scandinavian loyalty had remained potent across the “Danelaw” areas of the North, the northern Midlands and East Anglia. In fact, when the Danish King Cnut invaded in 1014, he met so many sympathisers that England was quickly added to his empire. As James Hawes has observed, “the first united ‘England’ was thus created under colonial rule”. And given this disunity, it is not surprising perhaps that William of Normandy “conquered the entire country after a single major battle in 1066, an outcome that would have been much less likely if Anglo-Scandinavian ‘Englalonde’ had in fact been the ancient, united realm of some historians’ fantasies”.

After 1066, overt Scandinavian political influence in England declined rapidly, with only traces left. The word hustings, for instance, derives from the Old Norse “hústhing” — in other words, a “household assembly held by a leader” — from “hús” (house) plus “thing’ (assembly, parliament). In fact, there remain several “Things” across the Nordic world — from the Folketing (“People’s Thing”) in Denmark, to the Storting (“Great Thing”) in Norway, to the Tynwald (“Thing Meadow”) on the Isle of Man — probably the oldest continuous parliamentary body in the world.  

The picture was different in Scotland, where Norwegian overlordship of the western isles persisted until the 13th century. A few hundred years later, in the early modern period, Scottish mercenaries distinguished themselves in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Norwegian partisans actually fought off a Scottish invasion of their homeland in 1612. And even after Scotland unified with England in 1707, the Nordic kingdoms remained serious geopolitical rivals — to the extent that, in 1717, the Swedish Foreign Ministry planned to send an invading force to Scotland in support of the Jacobite cause.

Admittedly, this might have been to counter the Hanoverian George I’s designs on Swedish territory in Northern Germany. Britain as a whole was not sentimental about Scandinavia. In the Napoleonic Wars, Britain ruthlessly attacked Denmark twice to ensure the Danish fleet did not fall into French hands: first in 1801 (“I really do not see the signal,” said Nelson, ignoring his commander’s orders to withdraw from the bombardment of Copenhagen); and again in 1807, when the Danish capital was occupied by British troops, including Sir Arthur Wellesley, who named his famous horse after the battle.

The 19th century saw the Scandinavian kingdoms gradually withdraw from great power politics. The Second Schleswig War of 1864 is usually seen as the first key staging post in German unification, but it was also the twilight of Scandinavian power in Europe. Palmerston’s much-quoted quip about the Schleswig-Holstein Question being so complicated that “only three people ever understood it” was probably just blether to obscure the fact that Britain had (probably wisely) betrayed a solemn promise to maintain Danish territorial integrity, and instead decided to sit out the war between Denmark and its Prussian and Austrian invaders. For proud Danes such as the British Queen Alexandra, the humiliation of 1864 was hard to forgive or forget. She always railed against the protocols that required her son, George V, to dress as a “filthy blue-coat Prussian soldier” whenever he visited the new German Empire.

But with the bloody rivalries of the Dark Ages now ancient history, relations between the British and Scandinavian royal houses grew increasingly cordial. Queen Alexandra’s daughter Maud became the Queen of newly independent Norway after its separation from Sweden in 1905. And harking back to the Viking Kings of East Anglia, Maud’s own son Olav was born in Norfolk — at Sandringham in 1903. Olav’s birth came after a long period of deepening Anglo-Scandinavian trade: the housebuilding boom in British cities relied on Norwegian and Swedish softwoods, and Scandinavian timber was essential to the coal trade, used for pit props and railway sleepers. Danish butter and bacon became staples of the British breakfast table. Many British port towns and cities had great Scandinavian churches, like the spectacular Gustav Adolfs kyrka in Liverpool, home of the Scousers, and the Nordic diaspora gave us Cardiff’s Roald Dahl, Newcastle’s Sir Ove Arup, and hat-trick hero Stan Mortensen from South Shields, the grandson of a Norwegian sailor.

Suggested reading

The Viking war on woke

By Dominic Sandbrook

In 1968, King Olav V himself was invited to open the modernist Civic Centre at Newcastle upon Tyne, home of the Danish merchant navy in the Second World War, when 4,000 Danish sailors relocated from their occupied homeland to live on Tyneside. The building was modelled on the Stockholm Stadhus, as a nod to the Tyne’s modern Hanseatic ties. Although the King was attended by Lutheran ministers in 16th-century ruffs and gowns, the civic centre was seen as an emblem of progressive Nordic modernity. This was part of a process that was recasting Scandinavians as peaceable and stylish, representatives of the very best social democracy. But even the darker history of the Vikings, whose cruelty and sadism was almost unsurpassed, has now been rehabilitated through popular books and TV series like The Last Kingdom, in which uptight and sexually repressed Christians are contrasted unfavourably with the fun-loving Norsemen such as the smoulderingly handsome Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

From one of pillage and rapine, Scandinavia’s reputation has completely turned around in the last 1,000 years — but it’s surely their wealth as much as their cultural achievements that attracts us now. As I have argued, “the one thing that will change attitudes to Britishness in Scotland is for the UK to just be a wealthier and more successful country”. Returning to the restive streets of Orkney, it is perhaps not surprising that a territory that was Norse for longer than it was British now wishes to re-establish its Scandi ties. Yet, there was no Orcadian agitation when Britain was richer and more powerful, with a vast fleet at Scapa Flow. The difference now is that, unlike modern Britain, Norway is happy, successful, and stinking rich.

This stunningly beautiful archipelago off the north-easternmost tip of Scotland is also supposed to be the “happiest place in Britain”. And yet all is not well. On Tuesday, with a show of a dozen or so hands, the islands’ local council gave its support for “alternative forms of governance”, which could reframe its relationship with Westminster in line with crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or overseas territories like the Falklands. It could attempt to go even further, declaring its independence and reviving its historic links with Norway to becoming a self-governing territory, like the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark.

While discussions about going back to their Scandinavian roots are at the exploratory stage — even newspapers haven’t yet settled on whether such a move should be called “Orxit”, “Orkxit” or “Orkexit” — Orcadians seem to be sold on the idea. Reasons for the disgruntlement with Westminster and Holyrood are various, but include under-subsidised ferry fares, a miserly dividend from four decades of North Sea oil exploration and underinvestment by central governments into potentially lucrative wind power projects. As Scotland’s smallest council, it also receives hundreds of pounds less per person than the others.

Certainly, Orkney — and Shetland to its north — is distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. Geographically closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, the islands retain a strong Nordic character, even though they were last under Norwegian and Danish control in 1472. And life on the archipelago certainly has its upsides. It has good schools, affordable houses, clean air and abundance of space, but its winning edge is a form of Scandinavian communitarianism that instils a profound sense of safety and social trust among its 23,000 residents.

Here, crime is rare — the sort of place where farm equipment is shared and a builder’s yard won’t charge you for half a bag of sand. Nearly 40 years ago, my parents bought a property overlooking Scapa Flow which, with a few short intermissions, had been held by our wider family for centuries. On requesting the door key, the estate agent replied that one didn’t exist. (Despite soaring local house prices, which rose 8.5% last year, the average cost of a property on Orkney is just £221,000.)

“Bleak” is a word only our opponents use to describe the place. True, the first view of the high cliffs and red sandstone of Hoy can seem forbidding. Frightening even, particularly if shrouded in sea fret. And the weather in the Northern Isles is changeable, and best described in quantitative terms. The total absence of trees can upset people — but Orcadians reply, I think correctly, that they would only spoil the view.

Suggested reading

The Viking war on woke

By Dominic Sandbrook

It is a quirk of medieval history that the Orkneys — for centuries, a central hinge in a Nordic chain linking Scandinavia with Iceland and Greenland — ever found themselves to be a peripheral province of Scotland. Last month, while raising the prospect of greater autonomy, financial security and economic opportunity for his islands, James Stockan, leader of the Orkney Island Council, noted that “we were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom”. And Stockan believes the islands are being “failed dreadfully”. He recently told BBC Scotland: “The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are.”

Scotland’s acquisition of Orkney in 1472 was accidental. In 1468, the daughter of King Christian I of Norway and Denmark was betrothed to King James III of Scotland. The marriage treaty promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish Florins, but the impoverished Nordic King didn’t have this sum immediately to hand. Consequently, the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland with the intention of being later redeemed once the cash could be found. Alas, this never happened — a tragic turn for Orkney, which found itself a peripheral province of Scotland. Formal sovereignty was never transferred, and historians have long made the case that Scotland holds Orkney and Shetland in pledge rather than by sovereign right. To this day, Orcadians continue to make this point.

Would Orkney fit back into the Norse realm? Well, Orcadians do wear their Viking heritage with great pride. Norn, the local language of Orkney and similar to Icelandic and Faroese, was gradually replaced by Scots, but survived on the outer islands until the late 1700s. The modern Orkney dialect has a noticeable “sing-song” Scandinavian quality, characterised by a rising intonation at the end of a word (known as “the post-stressed syllable”).

Suggested reading

Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

The island also enjoys a strong sense of local patriotism and a separateness to the rest of Scotland. Orcadian poet Edwin Muir once infamously disparaged Scotland as “a sham nation”. In his History of Orkney of the late 1700s, George Low noted that Orcadians were reserved in their sentiments, honest in their dealings with one another, but “studious to conceal their gains”, while also being tenacious in their preservation of old customs. A politeness and civility also seems to pervade the islands, one now sadly absent in many other parts of Britain.

By modern standards, Orkney remains basically monocultural. Of course, the very idea might seem impolite and déclassé in a society where diversity is now promoted as a foundational value. For progressives, monocultures seem unacceptable, exclusionary things, in need of correction. However, Orkney’s monocultural strength makes it far easier for incomers to fit in. Unlike most of Britain, Orcadians set a cultural tone into which new arrivals can assimilate. The setting of clear rules and norms make it easier for outsiders to find a place in the community. It’s not uncommon for settlers from the south, called ferry-loupers, to give their Orkney-born children names such as Erland, Thorfinn and Mangus.

As large states like Britain become increasingly divided, I can see the attraction to Orcadians of re-uniting with their Nordic brethren. There’s a reason the UK government would resist these ideas out of hand though. The oil might be running out, but Orkney played a pivotal part in Britain’s naval operations in both world wars. It was in Scapa Flow that naval aviation was born in 1917, when Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning first landed an aircraft on a moving ship at sea. The loss of the Northern Isles would be a serious strategic loss to the United Kingdom.

While it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Orkney would be permitted to leave — only last week, the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: “There is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK” — an exit from a newly independent Scotland would seem much more promising. After all, if arguments of history and self-determination are ever to grant independence to Scotland, the very same would apply to Orkney. And this is where an even more practical issue would emerge: resources. A fledgling independent Scotland would struggle to balance its budget. Indeed, it may even be uncertain of how to pay its pensions — and in what currency? Without the unwarranted fiscal largesse of the Barnett formula, used to calculate the overall level of funding allocated by the UK Treasury to devolved governments, so-called “Highland economics” would be brutally applied by Holyrood.

Suggested reading

Denmark is a Right-wing paradise

By Maurice Frank

It is in these circumstances that the prospect of self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the Faroe Islands, might suddenly suit Orkney very nicely. Who wouldn’t wish to be part of a Norwegian state that boasts a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund?

Orcadians are acutely aware from their surroundings that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and that political jurisdictions are transitory. The archipelago resembles a pin cushion of archeological sites spanning from the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Stones of Stenness to Pictish brochs from 200 BC, to Viking drinking halls from a mere thousand years ago. What an irony it would be if an Orkney earldom lost to Norway in 1472 through lack of money was lost centuries later by Scotland for the very same reason.

Even when, occasionally, the seductive femme fatale figures are expressing joy, it’s more schadenfreude than innocent pleasure. They delight in cavorting with a new lover while their ex paramour skulks miserably in the background. Or else they are resplendently basking in their own physical charms while a rejected man stands sadly nearby.

Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the paintings featured in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen — which opens at the Courtauld next month — are sad scenes. By the Deathbed (1896), for example, shows a family assembled round a prone female figure, their eye sockets deep with misery, their faces gaunt and their mouths agape with wordless grief.

There is a purpose to this misery. In 1932, Munch wrote: “In my art, I have tried to clarify life and its meaning for myself. I also intended to help others explain life for themselves”. Art, then, was used by him as a form of therapy: a way of making sense of sadness and helping others to heal. Confronting us with our own angst and sorrows, he has a knack for reaching out to viewers of every background, in every age. He understands the nuances of relationships — the petty jealousies, the spite — and they manifest in his characters, who appear to us, the viewers, as all too human.

One of the first paintings you see as you enter into the exhibition, which is currently on in Bergen, is Man and Woman (1898). Two figures are seated in a bedroom: a woman sits back on the bed, nude, while the man sits with his head in his hands, in apparent torment. It is clear that a conversation has taken place, one that has upset the man; the woman is seductive, very much in charge in the relationship dynamic.

Munch was born to a bourgeois family in Christiania, the son of a doctor. Although by some measures he had a relatively privileged childhood, grief was at his heels. Both his mother and sister succumbed to tuberculosis, the latter at only 15 years old. Munch himself nearly died of a pulmonary attack as a child: as he coughed up blood, his relatives feared the worst. He survived, but was left with chronic bronchitis, and a permanently altered perception of the world.

Suggested reading

How Pablo Picasso abused his muses

By Ruth Millington

Munch reportedly suffered from depression and anxiety. The Scream bears the inscription: “Can only have been painted by a madman”. In 1905 the artist wrote, “You know my picture, The Scream […] nature was screaming in my blood — I was at breaking point”. And so he made art, as a form of expulsion. He once wrote that he tried to “paint out [his] fears”, in a way that a classical composer might throng their melodies with angst.

In Bergen, I had the opportunity to see behind the scenes of the exhibition, where several of Munch’s paintings were in the slow process of restoration. Apparently, he had a habit of keeping his finished paintings outdoors to see the effect the weather would have on the drying paint: he had put his canvases on the beach and in snowy gardens. One imagines his collectors furrowing their brows at such activities: surely Munch’s work needed better preservation and care than this? But as an artist he was very much invested in the present moment: he felt emotions intensely and wanted to act on his impulses.

Munch joined an avant-garde group of bohemian intellectuals in Oslo, in 1884, called the Christiania Boheme. They lived by a theory of creativity that maintained that the artist must look exclusively to his or her own feelings and thoughts in order to produce art of the highest order. Members of this group spurned middle class mores, supported sexual equality and free love, and advocated for intellectual freedom.

Around this time, Munch had an affair with a married woman, Milly Thalow, who was to be the (later unrequited) love of his life. He travelled across France, Norway and Denmark, learning from other painters, but his mental illness reared its head once more and led him to drink excessively: by 1908, Munch’s drinking had become uncontrollable, and he was hospitalised for long periods.

Suggested reading

Kingsley Amis vs God

By Boyd Tonkin

While sectioned in Norway, the hospital advocated for Munch to resume his drawing and painting as occupational therapy: it worked, in that it stopped the artist drinking, and he was able to resume his activities in the outside world. He had by this point, however, renounced his artistic goals. In 1909, he wrote that he no longer wished to paint “individual man’s sorrows and joys seen at close quarters, but rather the great eternal powers”. In his work after this point, there is a new expansiveness, a romanticism.

“What would you say was the archetypal Norwegian temperament?” I asked one of the exhibition managers. Smiling bashfully, he answered: “Shy. We are all shy. We used to all be farmers, you see.” Munch got around his shyness through painting: feelings he felt unable to express in person, he could scratch away onto canvas, their truth resplendent across centuries.

Did art cure him? Ultimately, Munch lived to the ripe old age of 81: his artistic pursuits all but cured his alcoholism, and tempered his melancholia.

As for the viewers, if we are not healed by viewing Munch’s works, we are at the very least consoled by seeing our innermost feelings so painstakingly laid out on canvas.

We might experience an uncanny sensation, like the one described by Munch, when he wrote of the married woman whose memory plagued him for decades:

“I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us, I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding round me — and as she disappeared completely beyond the sea, I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding — because the threads could not be severed”.

It is wrong to define Munch by despair, by agony, or by two hands fixed to a screaming face. Viewed in its totality, his work makes us feel at one with our fellow man. Our sufferings, though hard to bear, are shared by many. In this great universe we are not alone, say these canvases, but part of something much larger.

The exhibition Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen, opening at the Courtauld Gallery on 27 May 2022, will feature eighteen works presented together for the very first time outside of Norway.

Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.

Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.

As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.

I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.

Suggested reading

Norway confronts its Breivik demons

By Asne Seierstad

As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.

When I first read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a book about how ordinary Germans, from all walks of life, willingly participated in the open-air slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in occupied Poland between 1941 and 1942, I was impressed by its overall Arendtian argument; it seemed profound and radical. According to Browning, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed not because they were fanatics motivated by the ideology of murderous anti-Semitism, but because they were psychologically weak.

As Browning puts it: “To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot…” A broader argument soon materialises: that there is a line of good and evil that runs through every human being; that we are all, when the circumstances permit it, capable of terrible acts of inhumanity.

I have now come to think of this account of human evil as banal and partial. And I have come to dislike the glibness with which the account is expressed by its defenders, as though they are imparting some deep and unsettling truth about the human condition that is lost on the plebs with all their talk of evil and mythical monsters.

Well, we are not all capable of inhumanity, and while some people fearfully succumb to the weight of group dynamics and kill, others can’t wait to get started with the business of slaughter and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to enter a berserk state. And still others not only refuse to follow orders, but bravely intervene to stop their fellows from killing civilians.

The problem with the Arendtian thesis about ordinary killers, and the broader consensus that has hardened around it, is that it can’t explain ideologically fervent men who revel in the idea of murdering and humiliating scores of their perceived enemies. Men like Breivik.

Granted, Breivik was a pudgy-faced, piggy-eyed loser with blond sweaty hair — all now shaven off. As Seierstad recounts in her book, Breivik’s life was an elaborate catalogue of miserable failures. The problem was his tremendous narcissism and resentful anger, which sabotaged him at every turn.

More from this author

The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

As a teenager, he reinvented himself as a graffiti artist called “Morg”, claiming to be the top “tagger” in Oslo. But he was shit and annoying and was soon excluded from the “tagger” community. In another reinvention, he tried his hand at selling fake university diplomas on the internet, until he nearly got caught. He then joined the anti-immigration Progress party, intent on becoming a politician. That, too, went nowhere. Women, in particular, seemed to find him radioactive: he ordered a Belarusian mail-order bride who left as swiftly as she came. He would brag to his friends that he was a brothel man; this self-righteous and disgust-prone creep was probably terrified of women.

But for all these squalid and all-too human details, Breivik was a singular individual with a troglodytic interior world that made him stand out. Around 2006, he moved back in with his mother and retreated from the world, living almost entirely in his imagination. He became obsessed with the idea that white European culture was under existential threat from marauding hordes of Muslim migrants, abetted by white cultural Marxists and multiculturalists. And he began nurturing the fantasy that he would lead a secret order of knights to stop this cultural “genocide”.

Yes, Breivik was a chump and a radical loser, but he was no ordinary killer following orders, still less some colourless bureaucrat orchestrating mass-murder from behind the scenes, as was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the apotheosis of Arendt’s banal evil. Far from being banal, Breivik’s motives were related to his sense of worthlessness and lack of virility. Only by violently crushing all those who had made him feel weak and pathetic could he restore his sense of manly “honour”. In short, Breivik was an enthusiastic killer who wanted to kill.

One of the dark ironies exhibited in Breivik’s parole hearing was his appropriation of liberal explanatory motifs to excuse his monstrous behaviour. “I was brainwashed,” Breivik told the court on the first day of the proceedings. He had been radicalised online, he elaborated, embracing the language of victimhood that he so despises in others and that so many progressives employ to rationalise or explain away the crimes of “the oppressed”.

Breivik once had a grudging admiration for al Qaeda, and the courage with which its foot-soldiers embraced death in defence of their beliefs. There was no culture of violent martyrdom among neo-Nazis, and he bitterly lamented that. Now, it seems, Breivik has taken a leaf out of the jihadi apologia playbook, claiming that he was radicalised by dangerous material on the internet. While he hasn’t gone the full Shamima Begum, who has explicitly renounced Isis and its ideology, his displacement of responsibility onto the internet closely resembles hers and many others like her.

More from this author

The trivialisation of trauma

By Simon Cottee

It is hard to know if Breivik’s claim that he was radicalised online is sincere. Given that he continues to hold firm to his to neo-Nazi beliefs, it seems doubtful. In fact, I am inclined to believe that it was some private joke aimed at other neo-Nazis to mock liberals who use the self-same explanatory trope to excuse the radicalisation of jihadists.

I also don’t blame Breivik for flagrantly ridiculing his liberal oppressors, as he sees them. In Breivik’s eyes, they are his enemies, and he is a political prisoner. Perhaps the Norwegian authorities should in turn take him seriously and recognise him as such, which would mean refusing him any public stage on which to propagandise his vile beliefs.

Even in liberal Norway tolerance should have it limits — as should the virtue that professes that even the most fanatical and dangerous of murderers should be given a chance to present a case for their release.

On his desk they had found three badges. One declared: “Red and Proud”. Another: “No to all racism”. The third was the emblem of the Labour Party Youth, with white letters on red: “AUF”.

When Kristiansen’s body returned from the island Utøya, his parents dressed the 18-year-old in his first real suit, one they had bought together that very summer, pinning the badges through the fabric. Around him they wrapped the blue bedlinen she had weaved just before he left for the summer camp on Utøya. “Blue, blue like the sky,” he had answered when she asked what colour he wanted it to be. He had planned to move out to finish his last year of high school in Tromsø, the capital of Northern Norway, and hoped to take it with him.

And then, exactly a decade ago, on July 22, 2011, his life ended.

“Something is not right,” Kristiansen said when he heard through the walkie-talkie that a policeman had arrived on the island. He went to investigate. The last words he was heard screaming were: “Just run! Don’t look back!”

Kristiansen was one of ten teenagers found on the “Lovers’ Path” that loops around the island, his arm around a girl with long, curly hair. The eleventh on the path, the only survivor, later explained that when the shots came closer they had decided to lay down, pretending to be dead.

In the years after the terror attack, I followed the Kristiansen family for my book One Of Us, a study of both the neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and his victims. I was able to glimpse into the abyss that the bereaved were forced to endure for the rest of their lives. In Bardu, far above the Polar Circle, Anders’s mother, Gerd, showed me how dark it was down there, how cold, how lonely.

Death, in a way, fades into oblivion for those of us who aren’t close to it. We sweep away the abyss, brush it off and look away. Time creates an enormous distance between those who still grieve, and the rest of us. In the years after Breivik’s attack, I learned from the victims’ families that grief wants to be seen, to be remarked upon, to be recognised.

Still, I dreaded calling Gerd last week, after so many years since we last spoke. She taught me that the cardinal sin against a parent in mourning is not to mention the one who is no longer there, as if they had never existed. We avoid the subject because we are afraid to hurt, not knowing that the loss is so enormous that it needs to be shared.

Gerd was in a workshop when I called. She was ordering a bronze heart to put on Kristiansen’s grave for today’s anniversary. For years her pain has been mixed with anger. She was mad at the police, at the Government, at the Labour Party. It felt as if no one took responsibility for the children killed. Where were the secret services, the special forces, the police, the guards? Then she was frustrated with the marches, the outpourings on Facebook and the fact that she couldn’t scream out her pain in a society where you were supposed to show what they called dignity.

Further reading

Why was Jo Cox murdered?

By Kester Aspden

“This is a coup d’état”, Breivik told the policeman sitting on top of him when he was finally apprehended on the island. His killing spree had then lasted for more than an hour. Around him lay 69 of his victims. Marxist hunter, read a badge on his chest. Still on the island, he told the police that the children around him were far from innocent. “They are extreme Marxists. Marxist spawn. It’s the Labour Party, the youth wing. They’re the ones with power in Norway. They’re the ones who have presided over the islamisation of Norway.”

Meanwhile, other officers were looking for survivors. Kristiansen’s comrade Viljar Hanssen was found nearby, assumed to be dead. Parts of his brain lay bare, some of it outside his cranium. His eyes were a bloody mess. Somehow, a policeman found a pulse; he put the boy’s brain back into his broken skull and wrapped a cloth around it. The 17-year-old woke from a coma ten days later, missing an eye, the fingers that had tried to shield his face from the bullets, parts of his shoulder and many friends. Fragments of the bullets were so ingrained in his brain that they couldn’t be removed.

Ten years on, Viljar studies law in Tromsø. In his mind, he still discusses politics with his best friend Kristiansen. “Whenever I take important decisions, he’s with me, sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree,” he tells me from his parents’ hut in the mountains of Valdres.

It has been a dark decade for Viljar. First, he had to recover from his injuries, his angst and adapt to his glass eye and hand prosthesis. Then, he says, he was supposed to be grateful to be alive, without showing anger or remorse. But the heaviest burden throughout the years has been the ongoing harassment. Especially online, particularly from middle-aged men. “Breivik should have finished his job”, one wrote. Another wished for Viljar to be forever and continuously sodomised by Breivik. They criticised his liberal immigrant policies, however mainstream they were.

As the tone of the public debate hardened, Viljar broke down and stepped away from politics. Ten years after Utøya, a generation of politicians are gone. “Few survivors are politically active now,” Viljar says. “That is no coincidence.”

Further reading

You can't deradicalise every terrorist

By Liam Duffy

The Labour Party was in power when Breivik attacked, and a tearful Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg insisted that Norway would never give up its values and let the terrorist win. “We will answer hatred with love,” he said, and urged for “more democracy, more openness and more humanity, but never naïveté”. He was applauded across Norway for his leadership following the attack. But now that rosy picture has started to crack.

What seemed right at the time — to show unity — has stood in the way of important political discussions, such as the need to confront far-Right views and extremist opinions. When AUF has suggested that Breivik’s views are not only found on the internet, but resemble words that are spread even by parliamentarians on the Right, they have been ignored. When they have asked Right-wing parties to take a stand against racism, they have been accused of wanting to restrict freedom of speech. Anders Breivik has been considered an anomaly, rather than someone symptomatic of a broader far-Right movement. For that reason, he has not been mentioned in debates about immigration, integration or racism in Norway. Until now.

But something has started to change in recent months, as an avalanche of young Labour supporters have decided that enough is enough. “The attack was politically motivated,” writes former general secretary of AUF Tonje Brenna in her new book, it was “not a natural disaster!” After revealing the awful emails, letters, text messages, phone calls and social media posts she has received, she states that Breivik was not alone in hating the Labour Party, “nor in wanting us dead”.

“This is the last chance to make a stand,” Viljar echoes ahead of the anniversary. “That window will close now. The next rounds will be taken by historians.” In recent years, Viljar made a gradual return to politics and holds a Labour seat in the city parliament of Tromsø. Though he carries a burden heavier than most; if the fragments in his brain move even the slightest — from a hit, a fall or by themselves — his main artery could be ruptured. The closest fragment lies just three millimetres away.

When I spoke to Jens Stoltenberg last week, his voice cracked a little when he greeted me. I asked him immediately about this summer’s debate: “What was right then, and what is right now? What has changed?”

Stoltenberg — who left Oslo when he became the current General Secretary of Nato in 2014 — acknowledged that “until now the AUF has carried the heaviest burden”. It is a fact that clearly pains him. He was only fourteen years old when he became a member of the Labour Party Youth, and visited Utøya every year once he turned fifteen. “The debate is broader now; it has more voices. That is good,” he says.

But he was reluctant to say whether his decision to answer hatred with love — to indirectly de-politicise the attack — was wrong. “As the years have passed, I have become more conscious about how important it is to seek answers why the terror hit us,” he says. “It was indeed a targeted attack on the Labour Party and AUF. The terrorist wanted to change our country with violence. Therefore, it was also an attack on Norway.”

I tell him of Gerd’s grief. “I remember Anders,” he recalls. He met Gerd and her husband at a gathering three days after the attack, when their son was still just registered as “missing”. Stoltenberg remembers how he hugged them, and how he struggled to find the right words, afraid of saying anything wrong.

“We lost some of our finest young people and the Labour Party’s greatest talents that day,” he says. “The finest thing we can do for them is still to talk about July 22nd and stand up for the values they believed in, and fight so that it doesn’t happen again.”

For my part, whenever I’m asked about how Norway has changed since the Breivik attack, I’ve often compared it to a wound that has healed but leaves behind a scar. It still hurts, but Norway’s functions are not affected. Terror didn’t change us, unlike the attack on the US on September 11th 2001, which set off two wars within two years and leading to further radicalisation, the growth of ISIS.

Further reading

Why ISIS love to kill

By Simon Cottee

But I have come to realise that it’s not as simple as that. For just like a wound that becomes re-infected if it’s not opened and cleansed, Norway is now suffering from its decision to shy away from asking uncomfortable questions; its failure to address the root causes of the Breivik attack.

“You know, I’ve had two guys by the name of Anders fighting in my head. One kind, one mean,” Gerd tells me. “The mean one was stuck in my brain so I couldn’t find my child. How he tormented me!” she exclaims. “It still bugs me that he breathes,” she says. “That he gets an hour of fresh air every day.”

“By the way, they don’t carry the same name,” she adds. “Our boy’s name is Anders.” She pronounces the name in her Northern dialect, with stress on the A, and a hard d. She then pronounces Breivik’s first name in a cosmopolitan Oslo accent, with a light A and a mute d. “And apart from the spelling, they had nothing in common,” she concludes.

Gerd still weaves, and now even she owns her own loom. “We got money for Anders,” she says, referencing the victim compensation payment she received. “It was gruesome. I had my child in my bank account.” Then she spent it on a loom and the money stopped aching.

One evening recently, she went up to his room where his clothes still filled the shelves. One by one, she gathered his pairs of jeans, a dozen in total, carried them down to the cellar and took out her scissors. Gently she cut them up, trying to make the shreds as long as possible. Some dark blue, some stonewashed and light, almost white. The shreds piled up on the floor and she spent time arranging the colours. Then she lay the warp and started weaving.

Blue, blue like the sky. The colour she had thought she could never weave with again as her child lay dead in the blue linen, wrapped around the suit and the badges. Red and Proud. No to all racism. AUF.    

The country has halved road deaths in a decade — a bigger fall than anywhere else in the world. In Oslo they went even better. There were no pedestrian or cyclist fatalities on the streets of the Norwegian capital, a city with a population bigger than Glasgow. There was, unfortunately, one traffic death after a driver smashed his car into a fence in June. But this was still a big improvement on the previous year when five motorists died — let alone going back to 1975, when traffic there took 41 lives.

Compare this with Britain, which has the world’s fourth safest roads despite slipping from first place in the global league table at start of this century. Glasgow saw nine fatalities in the most recent year for which data is available. Leeds, significantly smaller than Oslo, had 26 road deaths, including 15 pedestrians and one cyclist. In our own capital, preliminary figures indicate 73 pedestrians and six cyclists were killed, with the youngest confirmed casualty just three years old.

The reason for Norway’s success story is simple: good government. Politicians decided it was possible to eliminate road deaths — and thus a moral imperative to do everything possible to achieve this bold aim to make the nation safer for its citizens. There was nothing dramatic in reaching their goal. There was just the hard slog of slow improvement through systemic changes with lower speed limits, fewer parking spaces, safer cars, improved roads, smarter technology, better-funded traffic police and more cycling infrastructure. One key aspect was intense focus on safe ‘heart zones’ around primary schools.

Suggested reading

Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Graeme Archer

They did not even rely on their own model. Instead they took the ‘Vision Zero’ concept pioneered 23 years ago in neighbouring Sweden, which decided that safety should not be traded for mobility. A law enshrined the idea that “it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system.” This was an amazing concept when you consider how numbed the modern world became to the primacy of cars on roads and over-riding need for speed in everyday lives. “It’s all about humans taking back the streets from cars,” said Raymond Johansen, Oslo’s mayor. “It is a win-win situation for our safety, our health, our quality of life and the environment.”

Vision Zero is being copied in other countries, including several British cities. But there are wider lessons in this triumph beyond the reduction of road carnage. For it serves as a timely reminder that politicians can make a huge difference — in this case, saving scores of lives. This is important to remember at a time when there is deep scepticism over Westminster, especially in light of the Brexit debacle, and when profound dissatisfaction with politics corrodes so many Western democracies. Talking to voters amid elections and protests in several countries including Britain, I have heard time and again the sense of despair over political leadership with the belief that politicians are distant, out of touch and uncaring. Often, people are right to be frustrated by political failure, although wrong to believe demagogic populists offer solutions to complex societal problems.

Norway’s achievement reminds us that leaders can be bold. But it also shows that improvements to collective well-being are often the result of slow, incremental change rather than the sort of headline-grabbing initiatives beloved by politicians. Just look at education, where standards have slowly improved highlighted by England’s steady rise in the international Pisa ranking for reading over the past decade. One strand of the success comes down to Labour starting to push phonics from 1997 under Tony Blair, then the Tories strengthening the policies, tweaking the curriculum and introducing new tests after returning to government in 2010.

The Norwegian effort shows a need for clear goals that stretch across departments.

Suggested reading

Could the Cummings nerd army fix broken Britain?

By Tom Chivers

This is something understood by Dominic Cummings, the combative driving force behind Boris Johnson’s government, in his determination to shake up Whitehall. He may be driven by despair over bureaucratic inertia and struggle to hide contempt for many politicians, yet he seems fuelled by recognition that government can be a force for good. This is a welcome contrast to the intuitive scepticism over the state that scars many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. It underlines why it makes sense to replace cabinet committees with focused decision-making bodies, another attempt to shatter the silos that disfigure too much of the public sector.

There are plenty more examples of such governmental success. The Institute for Government highlighted Ireland’s launch in 1997 of a ten-year plan to half numbers of ‘consistently poor’ citizens. Politicians and officials agreed the definition, analysed the causes, set targets, co-ordinated clear policy across departments, built consensus and learned from flaws that emerged. They achieved their aim five years ahead of schedule despite seeing four rival parties involved in government over this period. Another approach was taken by Singapore to empty its sprawling slums within a decade by setting up a specialist body with statutory powers to deliver a clear goal. Closer to home, it took New Labour’s ‘Rough Sleepers Unit’ only two years to slash the number of people sleeping on the streets by two-thirds with relentless focus on the issue and cutting across departments.

In his biography Tony Blair talks about setting up his delivery unit to “focus like a laser on an issue”, driven by “first-class data” to ensure he could “performance-manage it to solution”, which might all sound familiar to Cummings. Yet the past three Tory teams have all told me they were determined not to be enslaved by demands of ‘the grid’, the schedule of  announcements and events used to control the daily agenda, so it will be interesting to see if this one ends up feeding the voracious media with pathetic ‘initiatives’ and stunts to divert attention. The omens are not good. And will this government also end up frustrated by slow pace of change while buffeted by disruptive events? As Blair also said, political capital tends to have been whittled away by the time a prime minister has learned how to grapple with government and pull the levers of power.

by the same author

Why are we locking up patients for profit?

By Ian Birrell

It will take boldness to resolve some of Britain’s most intractable issues such as poor productivity, regional imbalances and a corrosive social care crisis. These get endlessly discussed but never resolved. And here lies another crucial lesson from those Norwegian roads. Politicians can act bravely, must focus on evidence and should brush aside the bleatings of lobby groups protecting patches. One business body in Oslo, after all, resisted the reforms designed to save lives with warnings that politicians were turning their city into a ghost town.

But to embed change, it is worth reaching across political divides to find consensus. Eight years ago I visited Texas to write about pioneering prison reform. Jerry Madden, a veteran Republican appointed to oversee criminal justice, told me he was asked not to build any more prisons as costs were rising in a state that locked up more people than any other place in the world. Yet he faced a conundrum: they expected 17,700 more inmates over the next six years. So he reached out to his Democrat rival. The two men accepted their differences on sentencing and drug issues, but agreed they both wanted to reduce the prison population. The result was innovative reform that invested in rehabilitation rather than incarceration, sparking a movement that has swept the nation, changed the debate and reduced prison populations.

Just imagine if such an approach was applied to social care in this country, a crisis that causes such pain to thousands of families while snarling up the health service. This catastrophe has many causes, from big cuts to local authority budgets through to staffing shortages intensified by Brexit. Johnson clearly does not have a plan, despite his claim when entering Downing Street, so why not do as he promised by seeking urgent cross-party consensus to deliver a service that is humane, effective and free at the point of use? Not with another independent inquiry, but with clear determination to sort out the mess.

After all, if Norway can stop children dying on its streets, surely Britain can save elderly and disabled citizens from living hell?

Certainly, it’s hard to think of a more expensive policy idea. If ‘basic’ means high enough to live on and ‘universal’ means everyone gets it then the cost would be astronomical.

Suggested reading

Silicon Valley goes hypersocialist (as long as they don’t have to pay for it)

By Peter Franklin

That’s one reason why UBI doesn’t get much support on the Right. As well as seeing it as unaffordable, conservatives also tend to see it as immoral – because people capable of earning their own way shouldn’t be living off the state.

However, opponents of UBI can also be found on the Left. In the Guardian, Anna Coote of the New Economics Foundation draws upon a report she co-authored for Public Services International, “a global trade union federation”:

“It could find no evidence to suggest that such a scheme could be sustained for all individuals in any country in the short, medium or longer term – or that this approach could achieve lasting improvements in wellbeing or equality. The research confirms the importance of generous, non-stigmatising income support, but everything turns on how much money is paid, under what conditions and with what consequences for the welfare system as a whole.”

Though there have been UBI experiments around the world, not one has become established as a genuinely universal basic income. The Alaska Permanent Fund is as close as it gets:

“…built from the state’s oil revenues, [it] pays all adults and children a dividend each year – in 2018, it was $1,600 (£1,230). The scheme is popular and enduring; it has been found to produce some positive impacts on rural indigenous groups, but it makes no claim to sufficiency and has done nothing to reduce child poverty or to prevent widening income inequalities.”

An annual pay out of $1,600, while better than a poke in the eye, is obviously not enough to live on. It’s also worth noting that other governments drowning in oil revenues have not followed Alaska’s example. For instance, the Norwegian government used its fossil fuel bonanza to set up a sovereign wealth fund that now owns 1.3% of the world’s stocks and is worth almost $200,000 for every citizen. But while the fund could afford to pay out a per capita dividend, it doesn’t.

Even in a petro-state, money is finite. Any significant sum paid out directly to citizens comes at a significant cost to the long-term purpose of the fund, which is to secure Norway’s prosperity after the oil runs out.

Coote cites International Labour Organisation estimates that a “sufficient” UBI scheme would cost “20-30% of GDP in most countries.” Cut that by an order of magnitude, and a pocket money UBI would still cost 2-3% of GDP – a huge annual commitment and, most likely, a permanent one. (Remember that the whole of the £14 billion UK foreign aid budget comes to just 0.7% of GDP.)

Before committing to a UBI, however diluted, government would have to be sure it couldn’t use the money to do more good another way.

In this respect, the freemarket Right should be more in favour of UBI than the statist Left. Quoting William Gladstone, economic liberals sometimes speak of leaving money “to fructify in pockets of the people.” That’s usually in reference to the case for cutting taxes, but the same principle surely applies to UBI. Right-wingers might complain that UBI isn’t earned and thus more akin to increasing benefits than cutting taxes. But, then again, the Right is not traditionally averse to unearned income – and UBI ensures that everyone gets a chance to have some.

Suggested reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

The Left, on the other hand, has more faith in the ability of the state to spend money productively on our behalf. Thus if ever the state found itself wondering what to do with a few spare billions (or rather tens or hundreds of billions) then there’d still be a case against UBI. That’s because UBI’s key advantage – the fact that it provides a means of support that every citizen can rely on no matter what – can be delivered in other ways. For instance, Coote argues for the provision of “Universal Basic Services” instead, i.e. public goods that everyone can access free at the point of need.

In the UK we already have some of these – most notably the NHS and primary/secondary education. If the resources became available then we could offer others:

“…it is argued that a similar approach should be applied to areas such as transport, housing, social care and information – everyday essentials that should be available to all. Collective provision offers more cost-effective, socially just, redistributive and sustainable ways of meeting people’s needs than leaving individuals to buy what they can afford in the marketplace.”

But just how universal would these additional services be in practice? They might be so basic or badly run that most people would go private – leaving only those with no choice using them.

One also has to ask searching questions about personal dignity. In some cases, collective choices by a competent government are unquestionably more efficient than individual ones. But is there a point at which state provision, however well-delivered and well-intentioned, undermines individual autonomy? Personally, I’d rather trust my medical dignity to the NHS at its best than US-style healthcare at its worst; but the idea of the state exercising a similar degree of control over my “transport, housing, social care and information” is another matter. With the partial exception of social care, these are surely things that a capable adult on a decent wage would expect to sort out and decide for themselves.

Suggested reading

Never mind UBI (Universal Basic Income), what we need is UBV (Universal Basic Vegetables)

By Peter Franklin

Rather than tax cuts, UBI or the expansion of universal basic services, I would prefer we channel new resources into universal basic opportunities, i.e. the investments in infrastructure and skills that most directly boost the ability of left-behind individuals and communities to stand on their own feet.