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.

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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.

Compared to the election of 2026, the difference is like night and day. Though 2006 was, in essence, a true watershed election, one that ended an entire political era, the political rhetoric of the day hardly reflected it. Back in those days, the campaign saw genuine debates about the policy differences between the major parties, as the Moderates, restyled the “New Moderates” by their then-leader, angled to make the case that Sweden’s old social-welfare model had become stultified and unresponsive, and that the Social Democrats themselves, so used to automatically gliding into power every election, were unwilling to reform. The most famous Moderate slogan from that election was “Det Nya Arbetarpartiet” — literally branding themselves as Sweden’s new (and only) working-class party.

Today, by contrast, elections in Sweden bear increasing resemblance to the electoral process of the United States, right down to the political rhetoric used by both sides. In 2026, after all, both political blocs were eager to dub this election the most important, most critical, most life-and-death election in history. If the evil Right-wingers won, fascism and darkness would descend on all and sundry, and there wouldn’t even be a Sweden left come 2030. If the crazed leftist Islamo-Marxists won, meanwhile, tens of millions of immigrants would descend on the country; no election would ever be winnable again due to changed demographics; being heterosexual or white would soon be punishable by death; and Sweden would shortly become Europe’s first Islamic emirate.

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Of course, the problem here is that the “evil Right-wingers” have been in power for the last four years. Despite some internal drama, the four parties that make up the so-called “Tidö government” — the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats — have ruled the country largely without incident, and certainly not with jackboots sounding in the distance. Some things, like food-price inflation, have certainly got worse, but it’s hard to blame that on any specific policy. Meanwhile, big planks of the 2022 election, like massively expanding Sweden’s fleet of nuclear power plants, have quietly been thrown overboard in the last few years. But, again, there is no reason to think anything would have been different had the so-called “Red-Green coalition” been in power instead.

Certainly, it’s unsurprising that electoral participation actually plummeted this time round. The figures, with turnout in the eighties, would, of course, be impressive in many other countries. But for ultra-democratic Sweden, this is one of the lowest figures since the Second World War. The point, of course, is these figures hit up against the electoral rhetoric. If the future really was at stake, and this really was the last election before migrants or fascists destroyed the state, why did fewer people than ever bother to vote?

The answer is probably structural. In Sweden, just like in America, the louder the pundits’ voices, the less elections actually seem to matter in terms of hard policy. Nobody talked about the looming end of the Swedish democratic system or nation in 2006, but the choices on offer were actually meaningfully different. Today, though, those meaningful differences are becoming rarer and rarer. Consider the American example: as the Trump campaign put it in the lead-up to the 2024 election, a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for sending America’s sons and daughter to war against Iran, and a vote for ruinous price inflation and unaffordable gas at home. To be fair, that description is probably true as far as politics under a Kamala Harris presidency would have turned out. Unfortunately, the idea that Trump was against these things turned out to be a huge lie. No matter which side you picked, the end result was the same.

This dynamic seems to have spelled the end of the current Tidö government. It came into power with much fanfare, promising a drastic reduction of immigration. Yet critics are today quick to point out that little has changed in terms of migrants granted citizenship. And, indeed, even as a government of the Right looks slated to be replaced by a government of the Left, the chances of anything meaningfully changing in the other direction look very slim as well. The number of granted asylum applications may have diminished, after all, yet other forms of migration — for family reunification or labor — have picked up the slack. Other policy differences between the political blocks, notably attitudes toward Natos, have been retired too. One way or another, business as usual looks set to continue.

One doesn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction in 2026: the general trend in Europe is that little will change whoever you vote for. Once again, that’s clear on demographics. Boris Johnson promised to cut down on immigration: what he delivered was the “Boriswave”. Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian prime minister, belongs to a party that traces its history back to the Italian fascists. Yet despite these august credentials, Meloni’s tenure in power has seen her quietly increase migration. The structural reasons for this aren’t hard to understand: Italy’s demographics are terrible and the country has long been plagued with financial woes. No matter how much Meloni might rage against immigration rhetorically, her deeds aren’t particularly different from anyone else. Perhaps a figure to Meloni’s Right — such the former army officer Roberto Vannacci — would finally change course if voted into power. But the question one has to ask here is simple: why didn’t Meloni do it?

Perhaps our political classes have simply given up because the problems are too intractable. It wouldn’t exactly be shocking if that was the case, and it would mean that America and Europe are in the same boat. Consider the fact that, less than two years ago, the second Trump presidency promised to fix the deficit, reindustrialize America, and cut huge amounts of waste from the budget. Back then, DOGE was at the top of the news cycle, for good and for ill. Today, that organization no longer even exists. Americans, after trying to fix the national debt or stop the forever wars in the Middle East, simply gave up. It was too hard to change anything meaningful. The same might be said of the Europeans and migration: trapped by the remorseless logic of globalization and with native birthrates that simply refuse to go up. Amid these seemingly intractable challenges, why not grant another few thousand visas? Voters are perhaps to blame here too, unwilling to countenance much change, whatever they might claim in vox pops.

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Will Sweden build the Bomb?

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

Whatever the cause of this malaise, in it we can spot the paradox of European politics in the 21st century. We can all clearly see that monumental, historical changes are happening. Wars and energy shocks rage all around us, deindustrialization and demographic problems keep getting worse and worse, and yet everyone seems too afraid to do much beyond shouting, with the rhetorical temperature seemingly rising in inverse proportion to actual policy solutions. But as the American economist Herbert Stein put it, things that cannot go on forever simply won’t. If fixing pensions or finding a new geopolitical strategy or addressing the deficits is too hard for anyone to make the attempt, there will eventually come some sort of crisis that forces the change that politicians have been avoiding.

Unlike 2006, the election of 2026 was heralded the most important Swedish election of our lifetimes  — if not the most important election ever. Every election these days seems to be the most important election ever, of course, and just as in America or the United Kingdom, the more important an election is, the less anyone expects anything to actually change. But as the Middle East burns and an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Seventies approaches, the age of business as usual may be ending sooner than many people think.

“Everything should be on the table in this situation,” proclaimed the leader of the Swedish Democrats, a member of the nation’s governing coalition. Similar views are being aired in the press. “The umbrella is gone,” writes one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, referring to the American nuclear deterrent, urging Stockholm to consider acquiring nuclear weapons itself.

This might seem surprising, not least given the long-standing Nordic reputation for gentle diplomacy. In truth, though, Sweden is an ideal candidate for joining the nuclear club, quite aside from the nuclear-armed opponent on its doorstep. Boasting one of the most sophisticated arms industries in Europe, a robust civilian nuclear power sector, and indeed an abortive scheme to build a bomb during the Cold War, Sweden has everything it needs to go nuclear — even though Nordic proliferation could be the death knell for the whole Nato alliance.

If America’s commitment to Europe no longer seems credible, the Nordics also can’t rely on partners closer to home. Certainly, the Nato goal of raising allied defense spending to 5% of GDP seems distant, while the continent’s stagnant economies, burdened by ballooning welfare schemes, show little appetite for higher defense budgets. Spain is emblematic of this attitude, with Madrid spending just 1.28% of GDP on its military. Calls to raise this level to 5% were dismissed by Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, as “disrespectful”, and who instead pledged not to cut a single cent from welfare spending. Italy is in a similar position, while even France, the strongest proponent of European strategic autonomy, is unable to mend its bloated pension system.

In other words, the Nordic countries find themselves alone, menaced by a threat they view as existential. For most other European countries — with the exception of Poland and the Baltics — the Russian danger feels remote. Few expect Putin’s tanks to roll into Berlin or Rome. The Nordic countries, on the other hand, see Russia as a clear and present danger, and for good reason. Swedish intelligence has long warned of Moscow targeting Swedish territorial integrity. Norway reports that Russian aircraft have violated its airspace for the first time in a decade, that preparations for sabotaging its water system could be underway, and that Russian GPS-jamming is making an airspace incident increasingly likely. Just two weeks ago, Finland caught a ship suspected of sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic. The pressure, in short, is rising, pushing the Nordics to consider more drastic security options.

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And internally, too, Sweden has reasons to go nuclear. The expertise accumulated in its civilian nuclear sector — control over the fuel cycle, reactor physics, supply chains — provides a solid foundation for military development. Another advantage is Sweden’s world-class manufacturing base. Unlike much of Europe, it never embraced the idea of a post-industrial society, and its defense sector is among the most modern and well-rounded around, producing everything from submarines to fighter jets. Saab has extensive experience with aviation, missile systems, and command and control; BAE Systems Bofors provides deep expertise with warheads, and explosives.

This engineering know-how dovetails with Sweden’s broader financial health. Of course, a military nuclear program is an expensive undertaking. Yet bucking the EU’s trend, Sweden has already increased its defense budget by 28% since 2023, with plenty of space for more. That makes Stockholm, alongside the other Nordics, financial outliers. They’re not gerontocracies laden with debt. Their pension systems, unlike those crushing Southern Europe and France, were prudently designed to adjust to changing demographic and economic conditions. Just as important, their fiscal health is stable. Financing a nuclear project would not be an insurmountable financial burden.

These economic strengths are also echoed elsewhere. In recent months, after all, Sweden has become something of a monetary safe haven, with a convenience yield lower than Switzerland’s. In layman’s terms, markets are eager to buy Swedish government bonds even at very low yields, effectively paying a premium to park capital in this famously stable jurisdiction. Borrowing to finance a nuclear program would therefore not be a problem for Sweden, especially if it shared the burden with the other Nordics.

As one Norwegian researcher bluntly declares, now that the US has lost the will to defend Europe, the only solution is a northern alliance equipped with a nuclear deterrent. Former Danish defense minister Jeppe Kofod has also proposed a Nordic defense union with the Bomb at its core. Commentators in the Swedish press are themselves discussing the idea, though whether Scandinavian jealousies can be tempered to create a joint nuclear umbrella remains an open question.

Yet perhaps the greatest challenge to acquiring the Bomb would be psychological. Sweden’s national identity is closely tied to pacifism, and Stockholm has long been an outspoken supporter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). One could argue, however, that trading ideological commitments for national survival is not an unreasonable price to pay. Nuclear states do not fight with each other. As the deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling famously put it, the threat of the Bomb leaves something to chance, making one nuclear power extremely reluctant to roll the dice against another nuclear state.

All the same, the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent would be a radical development. The theorist of nuclear proliferation Jacques Hymans argues that it was not the NPT that prevented nuclearization around the world — but rather the absence of determined elites. Go-getting leaders like Charles de Gaulle or David Ben-Gurion are scarce. Still, existential threats, of the sort that Israel once faced, are precisely what inspire leaders to eschew dependence on a distant ally.

Sweden has an instructive record of policy independence. During the pandemic, for instance, it diverged from the Western consensus by rejecting lockdowns. In the Cold War, security concerns led Stockholm to explore the development of nuclear weapons. From 1947 onwards, the country’s ministry of defense saw the nuclear option as the most reliable way to stave off the Soviet threat. A decade later, the push for a Swedish deterrent accelerated as the military pressed for its development — most notably Supreme Commander Nils Swedlund, who despised political bargaining and viewed the issue as key to Swedish security.

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As Tony Jonter explains in his book on Sweden’s earlier effort to build the Bomb, political elites ultimately halted the project, which was opposed by the peace movement, feminists, and parts of the military. Yet as Jonter discovered later, it’s unclear whether the program was truly cancelled — or instead driven underground. Certainly, parts of the military remained skeptical about the effectiveness of the NPT and regarded nuclear weapons as a necessary backup. These rumors persisted for years. As late as 1994, The Washington Post noted that Sweden had preserved structures and components essential for producing nuclear weapons.

One can speculate whether a Nordic nuclear umbrella — perhaps also including Germany — is even viable. A similar structure has never been tried in the past, and the path of overt proliferation is probably a non-starter. Building a bomb in full view of the world would almost certainly provoke a military response from Moscow.

Yet as Sweden’s Cold War experience suggests, another scenario could involve following the Israeli model of nuclear opacity: developing a deterrent in secret while signaling its existence ambiguously once acquired, in a way that shapes adversaries’ behavior. Even here, of course, Israel could not have secured its own bomb without the tacit consent of the Nixon administration, and it remains an open question whether a Trump administration would follow a similar path here. “Immediately after the Cold War, one of the biggest instincts of the United States was to stop smaller countries from getting nuclear weapons, and that interest is still there,” says Sumantra Maitra, a consultant and expert on international relations. “I don’t think the Americans would be very happy to have Swedes with their fingers on the nuclear button, just like we didn’t want post-Soviet countries to have nuclear weapons.”

A third option, then, would be to imitate Japan. Over the years, Tokyo, through both official and unofficial channels, has made clear that it retains the technical capability to build a bomb, and the credible threat of nuclearization has been sufficient to extract firm security commitments from the United States. Latent capability, a so-called “technical deterrent”, could persuade Washington to provide the kinds of guarantees it now seems reluctant to offer.

De Gaulle once remarked that nuclear weapons make alliances obsolete. This is not quite true, as the Japanese example shows. Yet the Nordic pursuit of the Bomb would unequivocally mean one thing: Nato is just a façade, obscuring a reality of sovereign states with varying interests, defense constraints, and threat perceptions. Whatever happens next, anyway, the frantic fluidity of Northern Europe’s security environment means that the time to choose is now — if the choice hasn’t already been made. The rising threat level, coupled with the Nordic countries’ penchant for contrarian decision-making, suggests they are ready to follow in Japan’s footsteps. Either way, Europe’s future will increasingly be decided in its north, dog sleds or not.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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By Andrew Doyle

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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Why Europe fears free speech

By Wolfgang Munchau

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

While the players themselves stayed at a remote castle, the WAGs and other family members were billeted at the luxurious Brenners Park Hotel, on one side of which green screens, reminiscent of those they put around stricken horses at the Grand National, were erected so they could sunbathe on the lawns unmolested by the paparazzi. Which meant that when they did venture out, there was a feeding frenzy.

It was unlike any other tournament I’ve covered. On one morning, I went for a run along that path and was almost flattened by a photographer falling out of a tree as he strained for a shot over the screens. At the time, it seemed an entirely mundane occurrence. Every night, after hearing rumours about their location, we’d rush off to see a large group of WAGs at a club or in a bar or dancing on the table at an unsuspecting Italian restaurant, surrounded by their entourages and photographers and reporters, as the well-heeled elderly tourists who comprise much of Baden-Baden’s regular summer population watched on in bemusement. Occasionally, the players would come to visit. Rio Ferdinand pushed in front of me in the queue at a gelateria.

For those journalists fortunate enough to be staying at the Brenners Park — how long ago expense accounts like that seem now — there was a rich harvest to be reaped by hanging around the bar, listening to second-hand accounts of what the players were saying, who was slagging off whom and who was sleeping with whom. It was gossipy, bitchy, enthralling and exhausting. It was the moment when English football definitively became part of celebrity culture, and totally unsuitable for the business of winning a major football tournament. Perhaps in hindsight, even though 9/11 had happened and Iraq had been invaded, there was an air of complacency, everybody high on Germany’s Sommermärchen in the days before the Crash.

England went out in the quarter-final and Eriksson, who died yesterday aged 76, resigned soon after. By then, there was a sense of frustration, a feeling that he had not quite got the most out of a fine group of players cursed by Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, with the Golden Generation tag. It felt the off-field activities had become too big a distraction — the affairs, the endless endorsements, the Fake Sheikh sting. Certainly, Eriksson didn’t seem able to deal with the fact that the Golden Generation didn’t really make sense as a team, that one or more needed to be dropped so a less glamorous figure could offer defensive cover, a coherent midfield sacrificed on the altar of celebrity.

But there was no great sense of bitterness. Eriksson was too charming for that. His great strength had been that he didn’t ever seem that bothered by anything, that he treated triumph and defeat alike with a sigh and a drawn-out, “Welllll….” Given his predecessor as England manager Kevin Keegan had tearfully quit in the Wembley toilets after a World Cup qualifying defeat to Germany, such calmness was both welcome and invigorating. What if we treated players like adults? What if management was not about spittle-flecked sergeant-majorly bellowing but about consensus?

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Turning to a foreign manager was, effectively, an admission of defeat by England, a recognition the system had failed. Justifiable concerns about whether it was really the done thing for a major footballing nation to appoint a foreigner bled into base xenophobia. Others might have quailed before that. Eriksson shrugged. And it helped, obviously, that he got results.

Towards the end of his first year in the job, in September 2001, 10 days before 9/11, England went to Germany needing a win to have any chance of beating them to the one automatic qualifying slot. Given England had not won in Germany since 1965 and Germany had lost only one of their previous 60 World Cup qualifiers, few gave them much chance. But it was one of those hallucinatory games in which the usual rules seem not to apply. England went behind but then equalised, then took the lead, then kept on scoring, eventually winning 5-1.

Sven, as everybody by then called him, suddenly became a messianic figure who transcended football. Sales of Ericsson mobile phones went through the roof. A 10-year-old boy had his hair cut to resemble Eriksson’s. It took an injury-time David Beckham free-kick against Greece, but England did qualify for the 2002 World Cup ahead of Germany. It was, though, Germany who, having gone through the play-offs, late got through to the final, while England went out to Brazil. Had Beckham not just returned from a fractured metatarsal, might he have made a better fist of stopping the break that led to the equaliser? Perhaps, but Eriksson was never going to drop Beckham.

Yet alongside the celebrity worship, there was a willingness to embrace youth. It was Eriksson who made Wayne Rooney the youngest ever England international before Euro 2004, and until Rooney broke his own metatarsal in the quarter-final, he looked capable of dragging England to glory almost single-handed. As other major names faltered, England looked like potential winners, even if a midfield of Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes lacked width on the left, pace on the right and solidity in the middle.

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By 2006, in truth, it had all gone a little stale; the porous midfield had become a little too familiar. Eriksson was the first manager to lead England to three successive quarter-finals, but the last was by far the least impressive of them. Treating players like adults, it turned out, led to Baden-Baden. Gareth Southgate’s assessment from the Brazil defeat in 2002 seemed damning: “We needed Churchill but we got Ian Duncan Smith.” England, seeking difference, turned to an Englishman and then to a martinet, but miserable reigns of Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello only served to cast Eriksson’s stint in a rosier light.

To remember only Baden-Baden, though, is to ignore what a great manager Eriksson had been. He was only 30 when, in 1979, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. He was a revolutionary, heavily influenced by English football and, in particular, by the success of Bobby Houghton with Malmö and Roy Hodgson with Halmstad. It was one thing for English managers to come to Sweden, bin the libero and play with a zonal system, but when a Swede started doing it, it caused an outcry; to some, he may have been too Swedish for England, but he had once been too English for Sweden. One newspaper jokingly printed an advert offering the middle of Gothenburg’s pitch for rent, given Eriksson’s direct style meant it wasn’t much used during games.

But it brought two Swedish Cups and a Uefa Cup — the first European trophy ever won by a Scandinavian club — and earned him a move to Benfica, where he won three Portuguese titles and reached a European Cup final. He capped two decades of success in the club game by leading Lazio to only the second Italian league title in their history. And he did it all with a sense that life was there to be lived and that it wasn’t really worth getting too worked up about anything.

Perhaps the most emblematic story came from Didi Hamann, the German midfielder whose goal at Wembley led to Keegan’s resignation and Eriksson’s appointment. He played under Eriksson at Manchester City and recalled one morning on tour in Thailand in 2008. Everybody knew Eriksson was on his way out of the club and Hamann, considering his own future, was sitting pensively alone on a sunlounger by the hotel pool. He looked up and saw Eriksson approaching, carrying a tray on which sat two glasses of champagne. He handed one to Hamman, who asked what they were celebrating.

Eriksson touched his glass to Hamann’s. “Life, Kaiser,” he said, “Life.”

The reasons for this new hole in the budget aren’t particularly unique: like every other country in the West, Sweden got too used to zero-interest policies being the new normal, and only belatedly caught up with the new reality brought about by post-Covid interest hikes. The central bank thus engaged in a game of buying high and selling low: loading up on bonds at a point where interest rates were low, and then offloading them when the rates shot up and the economy began taking a turn for the worse.

If one wanted to damn the central bank with some very faint praise, one could at least say that they’re hardly alone in this predicament: the UK is suffering from very similar problems, and much of Europe is stuck in a very deep economic malaise. Yet that doesn’t really change the facts on the ground: the Swedish state, which intended to boost defence spending in order to counter the threat from Russia, now finds that it no longer has the required cash in the bank. Thus, a time of very hard choices is approaching: either the Government must abandon the idea of these defence investments (many of which are strictly necessary just to compensate for what has already been given up on behalf of Ukraine), or engage in some very painful and very unpopular austerity elsewhere.

One might think that a budgetary disaster like this would receive a lot of coverage, but that would be quite wrong. Instead, the public debate in Sweden in recent days has been consumed by a very different story, one that, when taken together with the depressing news from the Riksbanken, lends an air of growing absurdity to the state of politics in both Sweden and Europe as a whole.

At the centre of this recent drama is a controversial law intended to make it easier to change gender. In theory, this should be a boringly familiar culture-war story, a tale of woke politics squaring off against supposedly narrow-minded conservatives. But reality is sometimes much stranger than fiction: Sweden today is governed by the Right, not the Left, and it is the Moderate party that is implicated in pushing this law through. The prime minister of Sweden — Ulf Kristersson — is thus leading the effort to lower the age at which one can change one’s legal gender from 18 to 16, even as a massive supermajority of his own voting base are against this change. To further inflame things, his parliamentary group is also opposed to it, although it is being whipped to vote in favour. And to top it all off, some of the law’s fiercer criticism is coming from the Left, where there are deep concerns about its promises to make it easier to access irreversible surgery.

The Swedish Right, in other words, is busy instituting a Left-leaning reform that some significant parts of the Left do not want, over the stringent objections of many politicians on the Right, and in total contravention of the desires of voters on the Right. Confusion thus abounds: why would the Moderates spend all this energy on an issue that only promises to make their own voters feel dismayed?

If one takes a step back, it becomes clear that this sort of political circus fits into a wider, pan-European pattern. Though the disaster at the Riksbanken and the Kafkaesque process to force through a law nobody really wants may seem to be completely separate issues, they are better understood as two sides of the same coin. As a politician, it’s easy to think that your job is first and foremost to be seen doing something, almost regardless of whatever that “something” ends up being.

Here we can again look to Europe-at-large: outside of the political establishment, the war on farmers in the Netherlands and in Germany clearly has very few friends and very many bitter enemies, yet it keeps going. In France and the UK, politicians are now beating on the drums of mass mobilisation and a return to total industrial warfare, even as the polls show that few are interested. Rather than channelling the will of the electorate, the new job of an increasing number of politicians seems to be going in precisely the opposite direction of what most people desire. Giving people what they want, these politicians seem to say, is a sign of weakness. It is a capitulation to “populism”; doing the opposite of what the people who put you in office want, conversely, is seen displaying the strength or “bravery” needed to stand up to the putative mob.

In a twisted sort of way, the logic makes sense. As the actual room to manoeuvre shrinks and shrinks — as deindustrialisation and the blowback from economic sanctions on Russia sets in — there’s progressively fewer popular things that politicians can actually do. Europe’s leaders have clearly put themselves in an almost impossible situation, promising total victory in Ukraine, economic defeat for Russia, and even the economic ring-fencing and isolation of China. These projects are now falling apart, and the fallout from those failures is gradually being felt. Even before the full-scale war in Ukraine, before the Covid pandemic, the European Monetary Union was clearly limping; Germany’s industrial model was slowly succumbing to its internal contradictions, and the EU project itself was stalling politically and economically. As far back as 2015, the EU’s only “solution” to the sort of economic stagnation seen in Italy was to kick the can down the road. Now, it seems, we are quickly running out of road.

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The poetic genius of Truth Social

By Malcom Kyeyune

Here, one is reminded of the French historian Jacques Barzun, who published what is probably his greatest work, From Dawn to Decadence, at the ripe age of 93. In our times, it is common to use the word “decadent” as a slur or a moral judgement, but Barzun himself famously took a much more nuanced view:

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off’. It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance… Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”

In the case of the Swedish Moderates, it seems that Barzun’s vision of “decadence” has now truly set in. They are far from lacking in energy; in fact, they seem constantly, frantically busy, doing things they themselves do not understand and do not want. The horizon of possibility seems to have closed, and only bad options remain: they can either renege on their promises to deliver a robust defence, or they can opt to fulfil those promises through ruthless austerity measures guaranteed to be incredibly toxic to the electorate.

The result of this is a sort of hypertrophy; a politics emptied of all sense and meaning. The Moderates are not alone in this, however; one only needs to cast a glance at the battles between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to find an even more egregious case of a political class completely divorced from its own electorate. And so we find ourselves in a peculiar situation: a world where popularity and respect look increasingly unattainable for Western politicians, and where unpopularity and anger will soon become the only real yardstick left to measure success. Sure, you might end up doing something nobody asked you to do and nobody wants you to do — but at least you’re still doing something.

If the court rules out a further appeal, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks could be immediately extradited to the United States, where he will almost certainly be incarcerated for the rest of his life on charges of espionage — most likely in extremely punitive conditions. “If he’s extradited, he will die,” his wife Stella has said.

The British Government’s lack of concern for Assange’s fate is not surprising: they are the ones that put him in prison in the first place, after all. More worrying is the fact that much of the public also seems relatively unconcerned. This is probably the result of a campaign waged against Assange over the past decade and a half, aimed at destroying his reputation and depriving him of public support. Those not privy to the case’s details may even think that Assange is in jail because he’s been convicted for one of the many crimes he’s been accused of over the years — from rape to cyber-crime to espionage.

Yet this would be a gross misreading. Since 2019, Assange has been imprisoned in Belmarsh — and subjected to “prolonged psychological torture”, according to a UN report — despite being technically innocent before British law, since he’s never been convicted of any crime except violating his bail order when, 12 years ago, he sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 12 months.

Assange’s ordeal began in August 2010, when he was investigated in Sweden for rape and sexual molestation. Four months later, the Swedish authorities ordered his arrest. Many viewed the timing as deeply suspicious: that year, WikiLeaks’ series of exposes had rattled Western governments and dominated front pages.

By releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential Pentagon, CIA and NSA files, the organisation had exposed civilian massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, illegal “renditions”, mass surveillance programmes, political scandals, pressure on foreign governments and widespread corruption. Assange took on the ultimate level of power — that which operates behind our societies’ official democratic façade, where state bureaucracies, military-security apparatuses and all-powerful financial-corporate enterprises collude in the shadows. The Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, who has collaborated with WikiLeaks for several years, coined the term “secret power” to describe this reality, over which citizens have no control, and often don’t even know exists.

Until WikiLeaks came along, this secret power had been largely shielded from public scrutiny, except for rare occasions, and thus allowed to operate with impunity. “For the first time in history, WikiLeaks ripped a gaping hole in this secret power,” Maurizi wrote. Today, many of us are aware of the way in which the national-security complex operates in lockstep with Big Tech and the media to censor dissenting voices. But Assange was warning us about it more than a decade ago. No wonder the system came down on him so hard.

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Was there any basis to the accusations that kickstarted 14 years of “lawfare” against Assange? Several years after the Swedish authorities opened the investigation, it emerged that neither of the two alleged victims had wanted to press charges against Assange — let alone accuse him of rape. As Nils Melzer, former United National Special Rapporteur on Torture, wrote in a scathing report on the Assange case, there are “strong indications that the Swedish police and prosecution deliberately manipulated and pressured [at least one of the alleged victims], who had come to the police station for an entirely different purpose, into making a statement which could be used to arrest Mr Assange on the suspicion of rape”.

One of the many myths surrounding the case is that it never went to trial because Assange evaded justice. In reality, Assange, who was then in the UK, made himself available for questioning via several means, by telephone or video conference, or in person in the Australian embassy. But the Swedish authorities insisted on questioning him in Sweden. Assange’s legal team countered that extradition of a suspect simply to question him — not to send him to trial, as he had not been charged — was a disproportionate measure.

This was more than a technicality: Assange feared that if he were extradited to Sweden, the latter’s authorities would extradite him to the US, where he had good reason to believe he wouldn’t be given a fair trial. Sweden, after all, always refused to provide Assange a guarantee of non-extradition to the US — the reason why, when in 2012 the British Supreme Court ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden, Assange sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. From there, however, he continued to make known his availability to be interrogated by the Swedish authorities inside the embassy, but they never replied.

And thanks to a FOIA investigation by Maurizi, we now know the reason. During this period, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then led by one Keir Starmer, played a crucial role in getting Sweden to pursue this highly unusual line of conduct. In early 2011, while Assange was still under house arrest, Paul Close, a British lawyer with the CPS, gave his Swedish counterparts his opinion on the case, apparently not for the first time. “My earlier advice remains, that in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK,” he wrote. Why did the CPS advise the Swedes against the only legal strategy that could have brought the case to a rapid resolution, namely questioning Julian Assange in London, rather than insisting on his extradition?

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In hindsight, the motivation behind this was more than murky: it appears to have been a matter of keeping the case in legal limbo, and Assange trapped in Britain for as long as possible. A year after Assange sought refuge in the embassy, the Swedish prosecutor was considering dropping the extradition proceedings, but was deterred from doing so by the CPS. She was concerned, among other things, about the mounting costs of the British police force guarding the embassy day and night. But for the British authorities this was not a problem; they replied that they “do not consider costs are a relevant factor in this matter”.

Meanwhile, it took the Swedish prosecutor five years to finally agree to question Assange in London — but only because the statute of limitations for two of the allegations was about to expire. However, deliberately or out of sheer incompetence, the request was sent too late for the Ecuadorian authorities to process it in time. The case relating to the two allegations thus expired.

The case regarding the third allegation, minor rape, was also closed two years later — thus ensuring that the two alleged victims would never receive any closure, and the accusations would stick to Julian forever. At this point, there was no arrest warrant hanging over Assange’s head anymore, but he remained in the embassy because if he had stepped off the premises, he would have been immediately arrested by the British police for violating his bail order (and, he feared, extradited to the US).

As a result of the Swedish authorities’ highly unusual behaviour, Assange had by then been arbitrarily and illegitimately forced into detention for seven years, as was concluded even by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Melzer, the former UN Rapporteur, would later list 50 perceived due-process violations by the Swedish authorities, including “proactive manipulation of evidence”, such as replacing the content of the women’s statement unbeknown to the latter. “[T]he Swedish authorities did everything to prevent a proper investigation and judicial resolution of their rape allegations against Assange,” Melzer concluded.

It seems, then, that the Swedish “investigation” was never about bringing justice to the alleged victims or establishing the truth; it was a way of destroying Assange by setting in motion the legal machinery that has been crushing him ever since — and of course sullying his reputation by associating his name, in the public sphere, with rape.

What role, if any, did Starmer play in all this? During the period when the CPS was overseeing Assange’s extradition to Sweden, Starmer made several trips to Washington as Director of Public Prosecutions. US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials. Using the FOIA, the British media organisation Declassified requested the itinerary for each of Starmer’s four trips to Washington with details of his official meetings, including any briefing notes. CPS replied that all the documents relative to Starmer’s trips to Washington had been destroyed. Asked for clarification, and whether the destruction of documents was routine, the CPS did not respond.

Similarly, when Maurizi submitted a FOIA request to the CPS to shed light on the correspondence between Close and the Swedish authorities, she was also told that all the data associated with Close’s account had been deleted when he retired and could not be recovered. The CPS added that the Close’s email account had been deleted “in accordance with standard procedure”, though Maurizi would later discover that this procedure was by no means standard. Since then, Maurizi has been waging a years-long legal fight to access documents related to the CPS and Assange case, but she has been systematically stonewalled by CPS — even though a judge ordered the CPS to come clean about the destruction of key documents on Assange.

Assange’s worst fears came true when, in 2019, the British authorities finally arrested him, after reaching a deal with the new pro-US Ecuadorian government. Following his arrest, the US immediately announced that it was charging Assange for computer fraud — to which they added 17 much more serious counts of alleged violations of the Espionage Act — and requested his extradition. This was the first time, in the 102 years since the draconian law’s enactment, that a journalist was charged under the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between a spy working for a foreign government and a journalist like Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder has been fighting his extradition to the US ever since, against a British judiciary system apparently intent on punishing Assange, even disregarding fundamental principles of due process. Melzer has described the proceedings as “a show trial more redolent of an authoritarian regime than a mature democracy… whose sole purpose is to silence Assange and to intimidate journalists and the broader public worldwide”.

Paradoxically, however, this simply confirms what WikiLeaks’ had already exposed: that nominally democratic states are willing to bend and even break the law to silence those who threaten the status quo, including journalists.

This is why, even if you disagree with Assange’s methods or political ideas, this case should matter. For it is about so much more than one man: it is about whether you want to live in a society where journalists can expose the crimes of the powerful without the fear of being persecuted and imprisoned. If the British state allows Assange to be extradited to the US, it won’t be dealing a potentially deadly blow just to one man, but to the rule of law itself.

Tegnell, both revered and reviled as the architect of Sweden’s more laissez-faire Covid response, begins by restating the fundamentals in answer to a series of written questions. What was Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? “No formal lockdown used.” What about so-called “circuit-breaker” mini lockdowns? “None used.” And what was the overall result in terms of excess deaths, or the number of people who died as a result of the Covid period? “Excess mortality differs slightly depending on the method but Sweden is at the same level as the Nordic countries and sometimes lower. The UK has a considerably higher excess mortality.” Ouch.

Frankly, Dr Tegnell needn’t have said anything else. The combination of these two datapoints alone — that the only country in Europe to avoid lockdowns entirely emerged with the lowest excess death count of the whole continent — should be enough for any fair-minded evaluation of the evidence to conclude that lockdowns were a mistake. The minimum evidential threshold for a policy experiment so radical and so destructive to society must surely be that it definitely saved lives; this threshold was not met, and in fact the Swedish example suggests that the policy may well have cost lives in the longer term.

The reason the inquiry invited Dr Tegnell to answer questions was to convict Boris Johnson of recklessness in not imposing a second lockdown sooner in September 2020. Tegnell attended a now-famous Zoom meeting with Johnson and Sunak alongside Professors Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and John Edmunds in that month, to hear from alternative voices. The theory is that they delayed the autumn lockdown in part as a result of this meeting.

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In his evidence to the inquiry, Tegnell meticulously avoids the traps being set for him, insisting that on the Zoom call he shared information about the Swedish experience but avoided giving specific advice about whether the UK should lock down or not. Indeed, in a memo written to the UK government at the time and shared with the inquiry this week, he concludes that the UK should take action of some kind, but in doing so should be guided by evidence.

“The short answer to the question [of whether the UK government should intervene] is in my opinion yes,” he wrote in September 2020. “The myth that Sweden did nothing during the pandemic is false. We have initiated a wide range of activities not least in the area of communication.” There was advice to work from home where possible, for example, and to self-isolate while you are symptomatic.

But throughout, Tegnell relentlessly places emphasis on the need for evidence: if he was not convinced that a particular measure provably worked (for example mandating face masks) he refused to introduce it. As a result, except a few notices on trains for some months in 2021, Sweden avoided face-masks entirely.

Perhaps the most interesting section of Dr Tegnell’s evidence is his analysis of the impact of the Swedish constitution. Unlike in most parliamentary democracies including the UK, Swedish politicians are forbidden from interfering in the work of the government agencies, including the health agency:

“The Government sets out the objectives of the agencies’ activities and how much money they have available to them… but it has no powers to interfere with how an agency applies the law or decides in a specific case… In many other countries, a minister has the power to intervene directly in an agency’s day-to-day operations. This possibility does not exist in Sweden, as ‘ministerial rule’ is prohibited.”

In other words, the real reason Sweden resisted the global rush to lockdowns in 2020 was that its technocrats (such as Tegnell) were all-powerful. Where politicians are instantly vulnerable to media narratives, public opinion and political pressure, the Swedish agencies were constitutionally protected from these influences. They had a plan, and they stuck to it. In other contexts, I can attest, the Swedish insistence on sticking to the rules can be quite maddening; but in 2020 it saved the day. It’s a paradox that will not sit well with many anti-lockdown campaigners who see the evil technocracy as the problem, and want to sweep away the “blob”.

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Further, Sweden’s constitution has a specific approach to crisis management, designed precisely to avoid power-grabs by governments during a crisis. It enshrines three principles: responsibility (in which the normal regional authorities retain their jurisdiction during a crisis), similarity (business-as-usual as an explicit virtue and goal, so that policies during a crisis should be as similar to normal as possible), and proximity (meaning that the lowest devolved authority should retain responsibility unless that is absolutely impossible, to avoid central government taking over.) It is a rubric specifically designed to avoid power-grabs by the centre during so-called emergencies. Tegnell continues:

“Sweden’s constitutional order does not allow for the declaration of a state of emergency. Fundamental civil rights and freedoms can only be suspended in the case of war. Public health emergencies are therefore regulated by ordinary law… It is legally impossible to enforce a general quarantine or “lockdown” measures.”

So, even if the Swedish politicians had buckled to international pressure and called for lockdowns, they would have been constitutionally unable to impose them.

If the Covid Inquiry were actually interested in preparing for future crises, this lesson from Anders Tegnell is a profound one. It points in the opposite direction to the “muscular” Asian-style central government so revered by Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove. It suggests that if you want to protect people during a so-called crisis, keep the politicians out of it, slow the spread of panic and enshrine in law the virtue of “keep calm and carry on”. It used to be considered a British virtue; a Covid inquiry that was more connected to reality might have rediscovered it.

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.

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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. 

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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.

The burnings had already become a geopolitical conflagration thanks to Sweden’s Nato accession, which effectively led to Sweden’s bid becoming hostage to the whims of Turkey’s President Erdogan. However, beneath the surface of immediate security politics looms a question of the status of religion and the position of minority religious communities in Swedish political culture. The Government’s rhetorical embrace of human rights, including respect of religion, runs in conflict with Sweden’s institutional arrangement that is hostile not only to religion, but also to communitarian claims at large.

As Henrik Berggren and I have argued in our recent book, Sweden is not only one of the most secular countries in the world — its social contract is based on a radical alliance between the state and the individual. The central purpose is precisely to liberate individuals from families, religious communities, charities and other institutions of civil society that limit individual freedom in the name of communal identity. And this moral logic results in a civic universalism that is fundamentally hostile to communitarian claims, including, perhaps especially, those that are made in the name of religion.

In this regard, Sweden sticks out in studies such as the World Values Survey. Not only is the contrast to the Islamic world particularly dramatic, Sweden also stands out compared to Western countries such as  the US and Germany, whose social contracts afford a far greater role to religious and ethnic communities. In Sweden, religious freedom is conceived as a right to practise religion as a private matter. Thus, the Swedish idea of religious freedom is as much, maybe more, a question of freedom from religion as it is a right to religion.

Faith in God or gods takes place inside the home, inside the individual mind, and only collectively in congregations conceived of as private, voluntary associations. Insofar as a church acts publicly, it is expected that they adhere to the values, laws, and mores of secular society. This “civil religion”, focused on individual citizenship, gender equality, and children’s rights, always trumps what is seen as outdated and conservative claims rooted in premodern notions of religious faith and moral codes expressed in various religious texts. The “holy” texts of religion should accordingly have no bearing on the primacy of the constitution and laws of the modern, secular state.

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It is in this light one must understand the growing conflict between Sweden and Muslim and Islamist activists, religious leaders and political regimes. And while the burnings of the Quran are important, there is further pre-history to the recent uproar that provides a better context for understanding the heart of the current conflict. Here I refer to the recent social-media campaign in which Muslim activists claimed that Swedish social services were kidnapping the children of Muslim parents. The background is that Sweden has experienced massive immigration in recent decades, including many refugees from Muslim countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This has resulted in cultural collisions in general, but notably over their very different understandings of the role of the family, of parental rights versus children’s rights, and the place of religion and religious faith in a secular society.

While the social-media campaign is most often described as a matter of disinformation and misunderstanding, one must also recognise that what is viewed from a Swedish perspective as legitimate and necessary can, from a conservative Muslim point of view, appear hostile to family values and parental rights. It is also true that children are removed from their families in accordance with laws aimed at protecting and supporting children. This pertains to all families in Sweden, including ethnic Swedes, but foreign-born children are over-represented statistically. While around 10% of ethnic Swedish children determined to need support are removed, the figure for foreign-born families is just over 20%.

In a Swedish context, the state has not only a right but a duty to intervene when it is determined that parents fail to give their children proper care. But this is radically different from what pertains in the Muslim world, where a more conservative parent is likely to see interventions by social workers as an infringement of their right to bring up their children as they see fit: in accordance with religious belief, their views on parental authority and gender roles.

Another illustrative example concerns the demands sometimes made by Muslims, as well as conservative Christians and Jews, in favour of a right to religious private schools and, especially, home-schooling on religious grounds. These demands are routinely rejected by the Swedish state, which maintains that decisions regarding religion should be made once you are an adult. Through these measures, the reach of religious freedom is actively limited. Religion is transformed into something that is a private matter, appropriate perhaps for adults, but certainly not a consideration in an education that is aimed to produce autonomous, modern children.

But this value conflict has a philosophical element: a naïve and abstract sense of tolerance as a positive value, one that is poorly equipped to deal with enduring and concrete forms of cultural difference. My sense is that there has been an implicit expectation that, over time, immigrants arriving in Sweden from less modern, democratic, and developed nations would eventually embrace secular, democratic, liberal values. And there has been, empirically speaking, some basis for this expectation. Many of the refugees arriving in Sweden in decades past, from Chile and Iran, for example, behaved in much this way. Women escaping the Islamist regime in Iran saw opportunity for more freedom in Sweden; refugees from Chile found more political freedom in Sweden than under the repressive government of Pinochet.

Many of these earlier immigrants were well-educated and therefore also well-placed to integrate into Swedish society through employment. However, more recent arrivals, such as those from Afghanistan and Somalia, have tended to be less educated, as well as more conservative and traditional at a religious and cultural level. These contradictions have been hidden by Sweden’s long-standing love affair with being seen as a moral superpower — indeed, today there is more concern over the negative impact on Sweden’s reputation following the Quran burnings than a genuine concern for Muslim religious feeling.

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But what we may be seeing now is the unmasking of this idea of boundless tolerance. We have already witnessed a profound shift in Sweden’s foreign relations: from the vague idealism of autonomous neutrality towards the hardcore realpolitik of Nato membership. Likewise, abandoning our current longstanding but incoherent cultural relativism will open up for a more honest position. Of course, it will be a painful process, accompanied by considerable confusion and conflict. But it may over time lead to greater clarity over what Sweden actually stands — and is willing to fight — for.

For while we live in an era of the “politics of recognition”, which promotes respect for difference in the form of multiculturalism, it is useful to remind ourselves what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who fathered the term, noted in his essay of the same name in 1992. Namely, that while liberalism may involve tolerance as a core value, it is also a “fighting creed” that can and will at times collide with competing ideologies. When push comes to shove, tolerance is of little help in facing challenges from illiberal political and religious ideologies.

In his seminal book, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper put his finger on the same dilemma, which he termed the paradox of tolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Precisely where the lines must be drawn will no doubt be subject to ongoing debate — but for Sweden, one suspects that the primacy of freedom of expression will trump demands for the special treatment of religious sensitivity in the public sphere.

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.

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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.

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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.

The details of Sweden’s short-term embrace of open borders, as well as the idea that “Sweden” as a culture or a nation did not even exist, do not need to be relitigated here. Many things were said and done in those years that really shouldn’t have been; things which caused great damage to the country’s politics and society. Suffice it to say that the pressure to conform, to go along and to denounce traitors within the ranks, was simply too strong for many to resist. Anxiety, after all, is an insidious force. It eats away at us from within, until the only way to banish it is to attack the people next to us — to look for witches and traitors to burn.

By 2016, the opponents of this moral panic started to organise. Alternative media platforms such as Kvartal or Nyheter Idag were launched, re-launched or saw their subscription numbers grow dramatically. And as someone who contributed to the re-launch of Kvartal (which had a very similar profile to UnHerd in terms of its ambitions to challenge herd behaviour in media and public discussion), I had something of an “inside view” of Sweden’s intellectual dissident circles during the period.

Back then, people really did believe that this turn towards intolerance was unique to the Left. The hope was that, once the Left’s hysteria burned itself out, there would be no more bullying of dissidents, no more denouncing of those who thought differently as fascists, no more stultifying social pressure to mouth dogma that you knew deep down was incorrect and self-defeating. We were, as the saying in Sweden goes, incredibly naive to think so.

Today, the Left’s moral panic over refugees has largely evaporated. Yet far from ushering in a more healthy climate of debate, it merely gave way to another period of intolerance, one which is even more ridiculous than the last. To understand why, we have to talk about chocolate.

During the tail end of the First World War, a Norwegian chocolatier opened the Marabou factory in Sundbyberg near Stockholm. A century later, Marabou still produces its chocolate inside Sweden, selling primarily to the domestic market. And while other Swedish candy companies have decamped to other parts of the world where wages are lower, the Marabou factory — now located in Upplands-Väsby — still provides well-paying manufacturing jobs to hundreds of workers.

In the last week, however, there have been coordinated attempts to boycott Marabou. The reason is simple, if comical: Mondelez, the American holding company that owns Marabou, also owns many other brands, some of which operate in Russia. Marabou itself does not operate in Russia, nor does it import from Russia, nor does it even sell to Russia, but that hardly matters.

There are, meanwhile, many national companies that do continue to do business in Russia, including the Swedish bank SEB and the state-owned energy company Vattenfall. Sweden also still imports Russian natural gas, while there remains an almost infinitely long list of companies who still sell to both countries. For those who want to make even a symbolic dent on Russia’s economy, it is clear that these businesses would provide more “logical” targets for a boycott. But logic has no part in these proceedings. Quite the opposite: to the extent that almost all of the “dissidents” from the 2015-2018 era are now copying the very Leftists they used to denounce.

In 2015, the moral panic around refugees had two phases. In the beginning, its social energy was directed outwards, and the belief that the world could be changed was the norm. For the first few years, people eagerly volunteered at various refugee organisations; they donated clothes; they raised awareness. Meanwhile, those who thought that accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees per year without an idea of how to pay for it were ridiculed, but this was also a means to an end. People genuinely believed that time and history was on their side; the “fascists” who didn’t understand were thus viewed with almost as much pity as hatred.

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In 2018 and 2019, the tenor changed. The bad news — unprecedented economic trouble; stories about refugees engaging in gang rape; ethnic conflicts bordering on riots taking place inside schools — kept piling up, and became harder to ignore. In response, the moral panic evolved into its introvert phase, as the righteous shut themselves off to outside sources of pollution and sin. People no longer volunteered or donated clothes; they tried to police their own hobby groups or ban speakers from appearing at the local library. This was a retreat from politics into personal purity spiralling, and the more the activists lost their grip on the rest of society, the nastier they tended to become.

The Swedish Right’s implosion has followed a similar script. In the same week that Russia invaded Ukraine, the extrovert phase began: people donated money, organised galas and welcomed Ukrainian refugees. They also uncritically approved of Nato’s more far-reaching breach of international norms, the weaponisation of Swift and the seizure of Russian foreign assets. Those who said that these things could end up hurting the West in the long term were shouted down and ridiculed. The sanctions would work, the rouble would turn into “rubble”, and we’d prove once and for all that Russian energy was completely immaterial to the economic health of Europe.

Of course, just as with those predictions about uncontrolled immigration ushering in a golden era of economic growth, the reality turned out to be quite different. Today, Germany is increasingly deindustrialising, while the Russian economy hasn’t collapsed and shows no signs of doing so. Inflation is rapidly eating into the living standards of ordinary Europeans, and the upcoming winter promises to deliver even more crippling energy and heating bills than the last.

The boycott of Marabou is thus the Right’s equivalent to the Left trying to boycott and cancel speakers at libraries — it is the internal phase. The boycott is focused on a company that cannot decide to stop exporting to Russia, because there aren’t any exports to cut in the first place. While defenders of the boycott say that there’s a logic behind it, and that segments of the public boycotting Marabou will somehow lead to Mondelez being forced to shutter all of its interests in Russia, Sweden is a country of 10 million people and Russia is a country of 143 million. The maths simply doesn’t make sense. Again, there are many companies in Sweden that are directly guilty of exporting to or importing from Russia; boycotting one for what is essentially guilt by association in an age of multinational ownership structures is an irrational fight to pick.

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But on a deeper level, the boycott of Marabou is in fact very rational, because it is no longer a fight about depriving Russia of anything. Rather, it is a fight about purity and righteousness, and of punishing the unrighteous and those who lack faith. As the West proves to be weaker than we expected, as our own economies enter crisis, punishment must be meted out. And it is because Marabou is a Swedish company, with Swedish workers, manufacturing for the Swedish market, that it is top of the list. This is the basic logic of witch trials: all the anxiety, all the uncertainty, all the cognitive dissonance that has been built up in a society can be solved, at least temporarily, by means of a social ritual that sacrifices the innocent on behalf of the guilty. Everyone agrees the workers at the Marabou plant in Upplands-Väsby have done absolutely nothing wrong, but that is not the point.

Off the record, many people are starting to admit that this is all driven by “emotion” rather than “logic”, that one simply shouldn’t talk about certain things if they don’t want to be hounded and bullied. It’s not hard to see why: if 2015 was a tragedy, this is simply a farce. Even if the boycott is “successful”, the only realistic outcome is that Marabou closes or downscales its production and Swedish workers lose their jobs. On some level, most people surely know this; and that once the mania passes, the attempt to try to hurt the country’s manufacturing sector during an age of widespread deindustrialisation is something they will deeply regret. But, ultimately, the pressure to conform remains too strong.

In 2016, Sweden’s dissidents on the Right claimed to despise the routine virtue-signalling and bullying that had become so endemic to public life. And yet, far from being a product of “Leftist logic” or “cultural Marxism” or “wokeness”, this penchant for moral panic has revealed itself to be deeply human and seductive. All of which suggests something curious about Sweden’s intellectual rebels: they weren’t really interested in abolishing what they raged against — they were merely waiting for their turn.

Swedish authorities condemned Paludan’s actions, while also reminding the world that the nation is committed to freedom of expression. Islamic authorities, meanwhile, have responded with outrage. Several countries have issued statements condemning Paludan — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Oman — as well as the Scandinavian governments for offering police protection to those who would commit such blasphemy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan also issued two statements, one calling on Islamic countries to adopt a joint stance towards such acts, and another asking the Swedish government to take concrete action to punish the culprits.

If it does not, the consequences could be severe. Sweden has been pushing to join Nato since shortly after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. But in order to join the alliance, it needs the approval of every single nation already in it — and that includes Turkey. Even before Paludan’s stunt, President Erdogan’s administration wasn’t particularly inclined to welcome Sweden, which it had repeatedly accused of enabling Kurdish militants. And in retaliation, Turkey promptly suspended talks on Nato expansion. “So you will let terror organisations run wild on your avenues and streets and then expect our support for getting into Nato. That’s not happening,” the outraged President said.

“Erdoğan and his administration have… framed themselves as defenders of Sunni Muslims throughout the world and thus were obligated to react strongly,” explains Tom Lord, co-founder of the Militant Wire research network. Even if Turkey backs down, there is “a chance that Sweden’s accession could be leveraged by Erdoğan’s administration to gain concessions from the US and certain EU countries”.

But exclusion from Nato is not the only consequence Sweden could face. Paludan’s Quran-burning has sparked an extremely hostile online backlash from a range of jihadist groups. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP), Afghan Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and the central Asian Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) have condemned Sweden, though the tone and optics of the condemnations differ. The TTP’s release — issued by its spokesman Muhammad Khorasani — is more politically calculated and mild in its language, resembling the statement published by the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan. Khorasani states that freedom of speech should not overstep the respect for Islamic symbols, rituals and values, arguing that acts such as Paludan’s constitute a violation of “so-called international law” that global organisations should address — or else dangerous consequences will follow.

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At the other end of the spectrum, though, the Islamic State’s Af-Pak branch directly threatened and encouraged retaliatory attacks. It also impugned Islamic countries for issuing cowardly statements and staging weak protests without taking any practical action against the perpetrators and their countries of origin. Indeed, the response to the Quran-burning has caused tension not only between Sweden and Islamic groups, but between Islamic groups with different agendas. Pro-Al-Qaeda jihadist Hani al-Sibai issued a statement expressing anger not only against Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but also Arabic countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. He called for the “liberation” of Islamic countries from their regimes, which he described as puppets in the hands of the West.

Meanwhile ISKP took advantage of the incident to challenge its regional enemy, the Taliban. It mocked the interim government, saying that while it claims to have defeated the US in the name of jihad, it issued just a single tweet to condemn the desecration of the Quran in Sweden — while also receiving funds from the Swedish government and protecting foreign organisations. In the latest issue of the magazine Khorasan Ghag, published by ISKP mouthpiece Al-Azaim, the group dedicated several pages to blasphemous acts, threatening to conduct attacks not only in Sweden, but against European citizens wherever they are. Lashkar-e-Jhagvi, which recently resurfaced with its first attack in Pakistan after years of silence, issued a similarly bellicose statement, threatening Europeans with more attacks and lamenting that Muslim organisations with money and power are not taking direct action. Other pro-IS networks did likewise, promising to bring the bloodshed to the streets of Stockholm and wage war on Sweden, saying the “infidels” will continue burning Qurans if Muslims do not take up arms and instil fear into their Western enemies.

All these threats cannot be taken lightly, given the history of blasphemy-motivated terrorism in the West, and Europe in particular, in recent decades. The best-known examples include the beheading of Samuel Paty, the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and last year’s stabbing of Salman Rushdie. But there is an extensive history of plots and attacks targeting the citizens of countries where anti-Islam events take place. In 2005, after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad, a series of demonstrations and attacks were carried out. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist, was targeted in two assassination attempts in 2008 and 2010. The first plot was foiled by Danish intelligence, which busted a three-man cell made up of two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent; the second attempt was orchestrated by a would-be attacker with links to Al-Qaeda’s East Africa branch, Al-Shabaab.

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Around the same time, in Sweden, similar assassination plots targeted Lars Vilks, who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad for a newspaper in 2007. Both Westergaard and Vilks survived repeated attempts on their lives. But when both died in 2021 — the former of illness and the latter in a car accident — radicals from across the jihadist spectrum, from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State to Taliban, celebrated. “The impact of the 2005 Jyllands-Posten and 2007 Lars Vilks cartoon controversies on the Western jihadi movement cannot be overstated,” extremism researcher Liam Duffy explains. “Al-Qaeda was able to exploit them as a radicalising tool due to the widespread anger outside of existing extremist circles…the blasphemous incidents were seen as an attack on Islam, even graver than the foreign policy grievances levied at the United States or Britain.”

For that reason, says Duffy, “Sweden and Denmark continued to be disproportionately targeted over other Western states all the way up until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which drew the jihadists’ attention away” — for a while. Now, Rasmus Paludan’s actions have made not only him a target but put Sweden and Denmark at markedly greater risk of terrorism again. Duffy refers to one IS-aligned propaganda group, which issued a direct threat towards Sweden, saying, “if there is no check on the freedom of your expression, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions”, pointing out that this is a reference to legendary jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki’s influential “The Dust Will Never Settle Down” lecture, which urged violence against blasphemers in the West.

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But despite all this — despite pro-Islamic State media outlet At-Taqwa calling upon supporters to kill Paludan and carry out violence against Sweden as well as other Western nations — the far-Right leader has not been deterred. Last Friday, he again set fire to a Quran, this time in front of a mosque in Copenhagen, before promising to do this “in front of the Turkish embassy every Friday until Sweden becomes a Nato member”. A couple of days later, retorting to accusations that he is on the Kremlin’s payroll (Putin would like nothing more than to see Sweden’s Nato membership blocked), he set another Quran on fire in front of the Russian embassy in Copenhagen, while making provocative statements directed at Chechnya.

Paludan’s activities may well have put paid to Sweden’s hopes of joining Nato, which would have implications for not only Scandinavian but also European security. They have also heightened the threat of terror across the West, while potentially making Westerners everywhere a target. Such acts have in the past inspired violence against both diplomatic missions and tourists. Meanwhile, they have soured both Sweden and Denmark’s relations with Islamic governments around the world. Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have even accused the nations of enabling Islamophobia, racism and discrimination. It is striking what one man’s repugnant actions can trigger.

The messaging had a familiar ring to it: politicians, Åkesson reiterated, had for too long been allowed to make Sweden “uglier, poorer and more dangerous”. It was time to take the power back. “Sweden will be good again,” was the title of the video. Not quite “make Sweden great again”, but close enough.

While Britain, the US and most of Europe have seen populist parties, populist candidates and populist party factions move into power, Sweden remains the outlier. Despite steadily growing support for the Sweden Democrats, the party has effectively been powerless since it won its first seats in parliament 12 years ago.

At first, the other parties simply shut them out. In 2014, six parties even made an elaborate agreement to guarantee the largest bloc passed its budgets — effectively voiding the far-Right’s mandates. The agreement fell apart less than a year afterward, which sparked a debate within the conservative coalition whether to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats or not.

It might sound odd that the conservative and centre-Right parties in Sweden have hesitated for so long. In neighbouring Denmark, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government took parliamentary support from the Danish People’s Party as far back as 2001. But the Sweden Democrats are an odd shrub in the Scandinavian Right-wing flora. While its far-Right sister parties in Denmark and Norway started out as fairly standard Right-wing populists, the Sweden Democrats has roots in racist and neo-Nazi organisations.

The Swedish Democrats, as Anders Ygeman, now a government minister for the Social Democrats, once told a Danish newspaper, “was founded by people who celebrated the German occupation of Denmark and not the Danish liberation”. This is perhaps a bit pointed, but the Sweden Democrats’ troublesome history is a fact that no one questions: the party’s own white paper about its history, released just a couple of months ago, basically confirmed that it was founded by people from different racist groups.

It has been a difficult couple of years for the conservative and liberal bloc. Despite a solid, non-socialist majority in parliament, the Social Democrats have held on to power because no consensus has emerged as to how to handle the Sweden Democrats. In the last election four years ago, the Sweden Democrats gained 17.5% of the vote, making it largely impossible for conservatives and liberals to form a government without their support. After months of negotiation, the Centre Party in the end jumped fences and decided to support the Social Democratic prime minister.

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Now, the other three parties in the former centre-right coalition — the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats — have decided to take the Faustian Bargain and ally themselves with the far Right. Will centre-Right voters follow suit? Ever since the Moderate Party began its reluctant courtship with the far-Right, it has siphoned off voters. Since the election of 2014, the last election in which they had a clear line against the Sweden Democrats, they have lost more than a fifth of its support — which is now down to 18% in the most recent polls.

In order to win, they need some of those voters to come home again. Or at least choose the Christian Democrats or the Liberals. The polls suggest the race is too close to call. In any other country, this would be a pretty good environment for the Right-wing bloc to take power. Law and order issues are higher on the agenda than they have ever been in a Swedish election, inflation is running rampant, and households fear what their electrical bills will look like this winter.

The rise in crime, in particular, is a weak spot for the governing Social Democrats. So far in 2022, the Swedish police have registered 47 killings and 273 shootings, putting this year on track to be the deadliest in a series of violent years. Reports of innocent passers-by getting killed or injured also strike a new kind of fear in people. On August 19, less than month before the election, a man was killed and a woman was seriously injured by a teenage shooter at a shopping mall outside of Malmö.

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But for many liberal, or even conservative, voters, it is difficult to opt for the Moderate Party or the Liberal Party this year, since a win will inevitably lead to a big influence — and maybe even government posts — for the Sweden Democrats. The far-Right party will likely become the biggest part of the new Right-wing bloc and have insisted that they won’t settle for providing passive support, although they don’t appear to seek the prime ministerial post.

At the same time, however, many Swedes are aligned with the Sweden Democrats on some of their policy proposals. One telling data point is that about a third of all voters say the party have the best migration policy. Many voters also associate the rise in gang-related shootings to the steep rise in migration over the last decade.

But there is more to its package than just a curb on migration. Prominent Sweden Democrats’ MPs have in the last couple of years put forward a host of illiberal proposals, such as control over the Swedish bar association, a replacement of all police chiefs in the country, more government control over the media and so on. In a column for the liberal weekly Expressen, the political editor Anna Dahlberg calls it an “incredibly difficult” choice for voters to make, but still comes to the conclusion that “good liberals” can vote for the Right on Sunday. Other famous liberals — such as the former Liberal Party leader Bengt Westerberg — have come to the opposite conclusion. Last week, he announced that he won’t vote for his old party, citing its decision to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats.

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Perhaps most peculiar are the many issues that are completely absent from the election. Neither the country’s Nato accession nor its pandemic strategy are on the agenda. Instead, it all seems to boil down to whether to let the far-Right in or not. The Social Democrats appear to have come to the same conclusion. One of their key messages is what a gamble it is to let the Sweden Democrats near power. As polls now show the Sweden Democrats becoming the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats have asked for one-on-one debates with Åkesson, instead of with the Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson, to hammer home their message. The Green party leader went one step further in a radio debate recently, calling Åkesson a “Nazi”.

Will this be enough? Certainly, Swedes appear to genuinely fear the rise in crime, and they don’t trust the current government — with its pro-migration coalition parties — to deal with it. On Sunday night, we will know which fear is stronger: the fear of crime or the fear of the far-Right.

And yet conservatives — particularly in Britain’s currently-flailing governing party — have a lot to learn from Sweden. The foreign obsession with the nation’s vaguely socialistic welfare system is myopic — and is happily beginning to wane. Increasingly, Sweden is receiving attention for its remarkable economy. There is enthusiastic talk of the Nordic tiger economies at Davos, while pro-business publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times praise the Nordic model of capitalism. The former praised Sweden’s economy for being “as strong as Pippi Longstocking”; indeed, the nation close to tops international rankings when it comes to economic clout and innovation, as well as quality of life.

Behind this success lies a moral logic that defies the stereotype that Sweden is based on collectivist values such as equality and solidarity. Upon closer inspection, it appears that the lynchpin of the Swedish social contract is an alliance between the state and the individual — one I have named “statist individualism”. In our high-trust society, the state is viewed more as friend than foe. This contrasts sharply with the Anglo-Saxon suspicion of the state, which is combined with a stress on “family values” and the supposed virtues of civil society. In Sweden, the state is welcomed as a liberator of individuals from traditional, unequal, hierarchical and patriarchal organisation — including the family, ethnic and religious communities, and charities.

If we look at the historical emergence of modern Sweden, it becomes clear that far from engaging in classical socialist policies, such as nationalising banks or private enterprise, Swedish Social Democrats made their peace with capitalists and businessmen in the late Thirties, having learned some hard lessons at the polls in 1928. Instead of radically re-organising the economy, they turned to a far more popular political agenda, namely social and family policy.

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The common denominator for this political struggle was the goal of eliminating the need for charity and philanthropy. It was commonly seen as demeaning to receive alms, cap-in-hand, even if it created a warm, fuzzy feeling in the bellies of the givers. The central aim of the social movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was to replace charity with rights. The essence of the new social contract was clear and simple: citizens have both the right and duty to work, and to pay taxes, which finance social rights and common infrastructure. The fundamental logic was one of reciprocity over charity, autonomy over dependence, voluntary relations over inscribed familial duties. In practice, this entailed the gradual introduction of social and family policies, reforms of the tax system, and institutions that served to free individuals — the working class, women, children — from unequal power-relationships.

This social contract depends on what I like to call “the Swedish theory of love”. Authentic human relationships are possible only between autonomous and equal individuals who enter voluntarily into close relations. This is, of course, shocking news to those many non-Swedes who believe that interdependency is the very stuff of love. But in Sweden this ethos informs society as a whole. Despite the traditional image of Sweden as a collectivist social democracy, comparative data from the World Values Survey suggests that Sweden is possibly the most individualistic society in the world.

In 1971, for instance, the nation introduced individual taxation. In perhaps the most radical reform in modern Sweden, the individual — not the family — was symbolically and fiscally recognised as the fundamental unit of society. Even 50 years later, individual taxation is rare globally. In the United States, for example, the family is the fundamental economic unit; the first question on the tax return is: “Are you head of household”? If one checks “yes”, the follow-up question is: how many dependents do you have? The figure then translates into deductions and tax advantages.

In Sweden, these questions would be unthinkable. Indeed, the very purpose of the 1971 reform was to promote female labour participation, which was effectively discouraged before (if a woman began earning money her additional income would be heavily taxed). The tax reform was then followed up by the introduction of universal daycare to make it possible for both parents to work while also having children.

There were several other key reforms during this period. Student loans were offered to all, regardless of income or family wealth. Corporal punishment of children was outlawed; indeed, there was a much stronger emphasis on children’s rights than parental rights. The legal and financial obligation to care for the elderly was transferred from the family to the state.

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It seems mysterious that a nominally socialist country could sport such a powerful brand of capitalism. But note the harmony between the Swedish model and the fundamental principle of the market — that the basic unit of society is the individual, and a central purpose of policy should be to invest in human capital and maximise individual autonomy. That is the key to the vitality of the Swedish economy.

This emphasis on individualism and free enterprise is also what makes the Swedish model so attractive not only to Social Democrats devoted to equal opportunity but also to Swedish Conservatives and market liberals — who favour the investments in human capital and opportunities for social mobility that are so central to an efficient market society. For liberals of this bent, the large role afforded to the state is rendered reasonably palatable, as the rhetorical focus shifts from the social welfare state to what I like to call the “individual investment society”.

But what works for the Swedish centre-Right might not sit well with the British Conservatives. Some may agree that the goal of combining social security with free enterprise is laudable in the abstract. Yet when it comes to embracing Swedish-style statist individualism, a number of considerable obstacles would seem to loom. Not only might one expect resistance from social conservatives for whom family values and communitarian Big Society ideals are dear, but both Truss and Sunak also seem more interested in invoking Thatcher and and on lowering taxes and limiting state power.

The radical individualism of Sweden also causes problems for the Anglo-Saxon Left, not least the “progressive” Left that has largely abandoned economic policy and civic universalism in favour of multiculturalism and the politics of identity. The focus is on culture war tactics, meaning the majoritarian politics aimed at actually taking control of the state are abandoned. Instead, the Left devolves into a cacophonic coalition of often conflicting group claims.

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Ultimately, the modern, Anglo-Saxon Left and Right both adhere to communitarian rather than individualist values and ideals. On the Right we find a romantic view of the traditional family, of charities and churches; on the Left we encounter a celebration of “community” and identity-based groups that, it is argued, warrant special regard and recognition, and repayment for past sins, from slavery to discrimination.

Just as the Swedish experience suggests individualism does not lead to narcissism, alienation and anomie, it also shows that the only possible common denominator for an inclusive, just and sustainable social contract is the individual citizen. In the realm of voluntary society, we may well freely choose to associate with those who are like us in various ways — on the grounds of faith, ethnicity, sports or stamp collection. But the state would do well to stay focused on the individual citizen when it comes to the logic of rights and duties. Sweden’s individualistic, civic universalism was built on an optimism that set aside grievances relating to past victimhood. Unlike today’s British conservatives or identity-driven activists, it looked ahead.

Lars Trägårdh is, with Henrik Berggren, the author of The Swedish Theory of Love, available on 30 August. 

It didn’t have to be this way. One country did it differently.

Late in the evening of 12 March 2020, journalists waited in a government building in Stockholm for the Swedish minister for education, Anna Ekström, to deliver a statement. Most of them expected the Swedish government to announce school closures. The night before in Copenhagen, the Danish prime minister, Mette Fredriksen, had declared that all preschools, schools, and universities in Denmark would close. Just a few hours earlier, Norway had followed suit. In Sweden, Ekström had just had a meeting with representatives of school principals and government agencies.

When she finally emerged and delivered her verdict, she explained that the government had chosen to keep the schools open. “It’s a clear recommendation from the Public Health Agency, and they are very keen to see it followed,” she said.

What no one at the time knew was that, behind the scenes, a retired epidemiologist had won his first battle. Seventy-year-old Johan Giesecke had been Sweden’s state epidemiologist between 1995 and 2005, and had a good relationship with Anders Tegnell, the man who now held the title. Decades earlier, Giesecke had hired Tegnell because he appreciated what appeared to be Tegnell’s complete indifference to what other people thought of him. Now, Giesecke referred to Tegnell as “his son”.

Both men, at the start of the pandemic, advocated for keeping schools open.

They did this for a number of reasons. Firstly, no one knew if school closures worked. On the one hand, there was some historic support for the policy: experiences from school holidays during influenza outbreaks in France, and the varying responses to the 1918 pandemic in the US, suggested that the number of cases could “maybe” be reduced by 15% by closures, in an optimistic scenario. But it also suggested that those gains would likely be lost if the children weren’t completely isolated when staying home from school.

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And the intervention came at a high cost. The bill for closing British schools for 12 weeks was estimated at 1% of the country’s GDP in a Lancet article (among the authors were both Anders Tegnell and Neil Ferguson). In the US, an equivalent intervention cost 6% of the GDP according to the same article.

It was a hard decision to make — unless you were Johan Giesecke. He was completely convinced that closing schools was the wrong route to take. Above all, he thought, it would be unfair on the children. Everyone in the public health business knew that school absences had an adverse effect on children’s living conditions (see here, here, here and here) well into later life.

That night, even though he and Tegnell had managed to convince the Swedish government to keep schools open, Giesecke knew defending the decision would be hard. The politicians of the world were panicking. Early the next morning, Giesecke wrote in an email to Tegnell: “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.” Just to be safe, he added a translation: “Don’t you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”

The Swedes monitored the course of events unfurling on the rest of the continent. The countries closing their schools and preschools were growing more and more numerous. Tegnell couldn’t understand what they were doing.

His confidantes at the agency agreed with his assessment: the rest of the world was rushing headlong into a dangerous experiment with unforeseen consequences. The head of analysis at the agency explained that Spanish school closures had pushed the virus from the cities to the coasts, as wealthy families fled to their holiday homes. And school closures would force many key workers, including doctors and nurses, to stay home from their jobs.

“The world has gone mad,” Tegnell wrote to two colleagues.

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There was one notable exception to the madness. In the UK, things still seemed normal. On 16 March, Tegnell and Giesecke emailed each other about a video of Boris Johnson and Chris Whitty explaining the British pandemic strategy, which so far included keeping schools open. The email thread’s subject line was: “Go, England”.

But what neither Tegnell nor the others knew as they watched the British decision-makers explaining their strategy was that soon the UK would change tack, after Imperial College released a report that made dire predictions. Without extensive action to slow the spread of coronavirus, as many as 510,000 people in the UK, and 2.2 million people in the United States, could die in the space of a couple of months. A rough translation based on Swedish population figures meant that almost 100,000 Swedes would perish.

But Giesecke was sceptical. He pointed to the example of “mad cow disease”: in 2001, the British had slaughtered millions of livestock to prevent it from spreading. “They thought 50,000 people would die. So how many did?” Giesecke liked to ask.

He always answered his own question: “157”.

He had more examples. Four years later, Imperial College warned that 150 million people around the world might die of bird flu. It ended up being 455. Four years after that, it was swine flu: the prognosis forecast 65,000 British deaths. The results? 474. Why would anyone trust the British scientists now? The new report, Giesecke wrote, was “way off the mark”.

Sweden, then, would defy the rest of the world. Here, people generally didn’t have to wear face masks, leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered — and young children continued going to school, football practice and music lessons. Some birthday parties were cancelled, of course, but compared to the rest of the world, young Swedish kids’ lives changed very little. They never had to wear face masks in school, nor undergo systematic testing procedures.

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Foreign media were quick to call the strategy “a disaster” (Time), “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times) and “deadly folly” (Guardian). In Germany, Focus described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake.

Many theories emerged as to why Sweden took such a different path. Some of them focus on Sweden’s constitution, which differs from other European countries’, for instance in the extreme autonomy of government agencies, and the constitutional right to move around the country. Others point to the fact that Swedish authorities were unnecessarily hawkish during the HIV epidemic, and weren’t willing to repeat the same mistake.

But the main reason for Sweden’s special path is uncomplicated: the Swedes made a different interpretation of the scientific data early on in the pandemic. They simply believed the scenarios presented by the rest of the world, and especially the one from Imperial College, to be vastly exaggerated. And they thought that lockdowns and school closures were terrible for public health in general.

Based on what we know today, two years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s pretty clear that they got it right. In July 2020, when deaths in Sweden — according to calibrations from researchers at the universities at Lund and Uppsala, based on the Imperial College report, were supposed to be between 85,000 and 96,000 — the Swedish death toll stood at less than 6,000. Throughout that spring, people had been free to move, go skiing, go to the gym; preschools and schools for kids under 16 had been open.

Children in other countries are still suffering the after-effects of lockdown. In the US, maths and reading skills for children between the ages of three and eight were lower than normal last autumn — and, according to the Center for School and Student Progress, native American, Black, and Hispanic students, as well as students in high-poverty schools, were disproportionately impacted.

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“American children are starting 2022 in crisis,” concluded David Leonhardt of the New York Times when going through the available research.

The story is the same in all locked down and masked-up countries. In Germany, studies show an increase in childhood obesity, a deterioration of language skills and concerning fine motor deficiencies; in Norway, newspapers report a “wave of sick young people”. And in Britain, the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has admitted that lockdowns exacerbated childhood obesity. The share of children starting school with a weight problem has risen by a fifth since the pandemic.

Early indications suggest that Swedish kids, on the other hand, have been spared. According to a new study in the International Journal of Educational Research, the proportion of students with weak reading skills did not increase during the pandemic, and students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds did not disproportionately suffer. Of course, every individual study needs to be taken with a grain of salt: had the world’s politicians and policymakers heeded this principle in March 2020, it would have spared the world a lot of grief.

What price did Sweden pay for the health of its children? Strangely, in the nation that served as a control group during the pandemic, deaths not only ended up much lower than predicted, but lower than in most other comparable countries. According to the WHO’s latest figures, Sweden had an average excess death rate during 2020 and 2021 of 56 per 100,000 — lower than much of Europe and below the global average. The corresponding figure is 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy.

Over the last few weeks, social media has erupted over the WHO’s plans for a “pandemic treaty”. Many believe that it paves the way for the WHO to overrule national laws and impose lockdowns and other restrictions without citizens’ consent. While the specific concerns are largely unfounded, the fear is not difficult to understand. Had Sweden followed global received wisdom during the last pandemic, it might have come out the other side with a generation of scarred children. While most societies avoided questioning the efficacy of school closures, and still can’t have a reasoned debate about the restrictions, we quietly went our own way. Perhaps the Nordic approach remains a model, after all.

For those who preferred the first perspective, there was plenty of data to lean on. Meticulous records of the death toll were being kept in most countries, especially the wealthy ones, and presented in stylish graphs on various sites: the Johns Hopkins University website, Worldometer, Our World in Data.

It was a lot harder to measure the consequences of the lockdowns. They appeared here and there as scattered anecdotes and figures. Perhaps the most striking data point came from the US: by the end of the academic year, a total of 55.1 million students had been affected by school closures.

But still, the death toll was more interesting. In early summer, The New York Times had published a front page completely devoid of pictures. Instead, it contained a long list of people who had died: a thousand names, followed by their age, location, and a very brief description. “Alan Lund, 81, Washington, conductor with ‘the most amazing ear'”; “Harvey Bayard, 88, New York, grew up directly across the street from the old Yankee Stadium”. And so on.

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By Johan Anderberg

It was The New York Times’s national editor who had noticed that the US death toll was about to pass 100,000, and so wanted to create something memorable — something you could look back on in 100 years to understand what society was going through. The front page was reminiscent of what a newspaper might look like during a bloody war. It brought to mind the way American TV stations had reported the names of fallen soldiers at the end of every day during the Vietnam War.

The idea spread quickly across the world. A few weeks later, in Sweden, the front page of Dagens Nyheter was covered with 49 colour photographs below the words: “One Day, 118 Lives.” Those 118 people had passed away on 15 April. It was the highest daily death toll recorded throughout the Spring. Since then, it had steadily been falling.

When the epidemiologist Johan Giesecke read the paper, it left him a little puzzled. On any normal day, 275 people die in Sweden, he thought. He’d spent a large part of his life studying just that: where, when, and how people die. The way the world currently thought about death was, to him, completely alien. When he’d taken part in an online conference in Johannesburg, one participant had pointed out that, in that year alone, more than 2 million people had died of hunger in the world. During the same period, Covid-19 had claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 lives.

Giesecke felt as though the world was going through a self-inflicted global disaster. If things had simply been left to run their course, it would have been over by now. Instead, millions of children were being deprived of their education. In some countries, they weren’t even allowed to go to playgrounds. From Spain came stories of parents sneaking down into parking garages with their children to let them run around.

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Tens of thousands of surgeries had been postponed by healthcare services. Screenings for everything from cervical to prostate cancer were put on ice. This wasn’t just happening in other countries. Sweden had seen its fair share of peculiar decisions, too. The Swedish police hadn’t tested drivers for insobriety for months, out of fear of the virus. This year, it didn’t seem quite as serious if someone were to get killed by a drunk driver.

It was becoming obvious that the media, the politicians, and the public had a hard time assessing the risks of the new virus. To most people, the figures didn’t mean anything. But they saw the healthcare services getting overwhelmed in several countries. They heard the testimonies from nurses and doctors.

Here and there in the world — in Germany, the UK, Ecuador — people had been taking to the streets to protest the rules, laws, and decrees curtailing their lives. From other countries came reports that people were starting to flout the restrictions. But the force of the resistance remained weaker than Giesecke had expected. There had been no French revolution, no global backlash.

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One explanation for the citizens’ passivity might have been the coverage of the deadliness of the virus in the media; it seemed they had been fed a non-contextualised picture of how serious the Covid-19 pandemic really was. During the Spring and Summer, the global consultancy firm Kekst CNC had asked people in five big democracies — the UK, Germany, France, the US, and Japan — about all kinds of things relating to the virus and society. The sixth country in the survey was Sweden. Sweden was a lot smaller than the other countries, but was included due to the unique path it was taking through the pandemic.

The questions were about everything, ranging from people’s opinions on actions taken by the authorities, to the state of the job market, and on whether they thought their governments were providing sufficient support to trade and industry. The twelfth and final topic in the survey contained two questions: “How many people in your country have had the coronavirus? How many people in your country have died?” At the same time as increasingly reliable figures were trickling in with regard to the actual deadliness of Covid-19, there was now a study of the number that people believed had died.

In the US, the average guess in mid-July was that 9% of the population had died. If that had been true, it would have corresponded to almost 30 million Americans deaths. The death toll was thus overestimated by 22,500% — or 225 times over. In the UK as well as in France and Sweden, the death toll was exaggerated a hundredfold. The Swedish guess of 6% would have corresponded to 600,000 deaths in the country. By then, the official death toll was more than 5,000 and inching closer to 6,000.

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Reporting the average guess was perhaps a little misrepresentative, as some people replied with very high numbers. In the UK, the most common answer was that around 1% of the population had died — in other words, a lot less than the 7% average. But it was still a figure that overestimated the number of deaths more than tenfold. At this point, 44,000 Brits had been registered dead — or around 0.07% of the population.

The breakdown of the numbers further showed that more than a third of the Brits responded with a figure of over 5% of the population. This would have been like the whole population of Wales dropping dead. It would have meant many times more Brits dying of Covid-19 than during the entire Second World War — civilian and military casualties included.

The war rhetoric brandished by the leaders of the world had had an impact. Their citizens really did believe they were living through a war. Then, two years into the pandemic, the war ended. There were no longer any foreign journalists at the Swedish Public Health Agency’s press conferences. No Americans, Brits, Germans, or Danes asked why schools were staying open, or why the country hadn’t gone into lockdown.

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In large part, this was because the rest of the world had quietly begun to live with the new virus. Most of the world’s politicians had given up hope on both lockdowns and school closures. And yet, considering all those articles and TV segments that had been produced about Sweden’s foolishly libertarian attitude to the pandemic, considering the way some data sources had been referenced daily by the world’s media, this sudden lack of interest was strange.

For anyone still interested, the results were impossible to deny. By the end of 2021, 56 countries had registered more deaths per capita from Covid-19 than Sweden. With regard to the restrictions that the rest of the world had put so much faith in — school closures, lockdowns, face masks, mass testing — Sweden had more or less gone in the opposite direction. Yet its results were not noticeably different from those of other countries. It was beginning to become increasingly clear that the political measures that had been deployed against the virus were of limited value. But no one spoke about this.

From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing.

Who would want to be complicit in that?

The Herd is published by Scribe.

After all, this war is nothing less than a godsend for Western elites. Domestically, it is a well-known fact that periods of international crisis or war tend to bolster the popularity of a country’s government or political leaders (the rally-around-the-flag effect) — especially if the country in question doesn’t actually have boots on the ground, and therefore coffins returning home, in which case it’s all gain and no pain.

You might remember the eerily prescient 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which the US president enlists the help of a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract voters from a sex scandal in which he’s involved. Every major Western leader could do with a similar booster shot. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau have all been performing abysmally in the polls, due in no small part to their disastrous (if not outright authoritarian) handling of the pandemic and its social and economic fallout.

The latest data shows that the rally-around-the-flag effect is already working its magic: approval ratings for all Western leaders have registered a significant bounce since the beginning of the war. Biden has enjoyed the best makeover of all, going overnight from Sleepy Joe — the embarrassing grandad known for farting at parties — to “leader of the free world”, as he self-styled himself in his State of the Union address last week.

But there’s more at play here than a few percentage points in the polls. On a deeper level, we seem to have entered a particularly decadent stage of Western capitalism. Today, ruling elites are increasingly unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms — due to neoliberalism’s innate tendency towards ever-growing levels of capital concentration and its disdain for democratic participation and empowerment — and are therefore forced to rely on repressive and militaristic measures in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority.

Hence their need for a more or less permanent state of crisis or emergency capable of justifying such measures. Which might help explain why the West seems to have been mired in a perennial state of “crisis” for much of the past 20 years: the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, the post-2008 financial-economic crisis, the pandemic crisis and now, just as the latter seemed to be waning, the military crisis in Ukraine. All this against the background of a worsening climate and ecological crisis. Indeed, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics in the West.

In this sense, the framing of Covid as a “war” — the ultimate state of exception — was no accident. But nothing beats a real war when it comes to rallying people around the status quo. This moment is bound to exacerbate the worrying trends that have emerged during the pandemic: the consolidation of the media, the blatant resort to crude propaganda, the shutting down of any meaningful form of public debate, the “cancelling” of dissenting voices, and the demonisation and criminalisation of whomever happens to be the public enemy of the moment — yesterday the unvaccinated, today the “pro-Russians”.

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At the international level, the weaponisation of the suffering of the Ukrainians might prove even more beneficial to Western elites. Their order isn’t merely in an internal crisis but externally as well. It’s threatened by the rise of new regional powers — first and foremost China but to some extent Russia as well. In the US, they still struggle to accept that the “unipolar moment” is over. Our world is multipolar, whether the State Department in Washington likes it or not. The crisis in Ukraine is in many ways a result of this collective denial, of the West’s inability to conceive a new order, and of its foolish dream of somehow turning the clock back to the Nineties.

By meddling in Eastern Europe, and ignoring Moscow’s security interests, the West invited conflict in Ukraine. It’s worth noting that the US is now adopting against China the same strategy of military encirclement that ended up triggering Putin. When a similar crisis breaks out with China at some point down the road nobody should be surprised.

Events in Ukraine make such a conflict increasingly probable. And that is because they offer the West and its military-industrial apparatuses the perfect excuse to whip up a new Cold War and militarise Western foreign policy, under the guise of defending the “free world” from a new Russo-Chinese Evil Empire. It also helps that billions of dollars are waiting to be made in the process. Indeed, arms manufacturers are licking their lips at the prospect.

The consequences for Europe will be profound. From the perspective of the US, it prevents the strengthening of Russian-European relations and the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality. It allows the US to reassert its hegemony over Europe, in particular Germany. Indeed, several commentators have argued that the crisis in Ukraine was partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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That pipeline was vehemently opposed by every element of the US establishment, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It’s no secret that thanks to the “shale revolution” the US is now a direct competitor of Russia in the field of natural gas exports. But even more importantly, the US feared that stronger, friendlier relations between Germany — and with it the rest of the EU — and Russia would have chipped away at Europe’s reliance on the United States’ security umbrella.

Well, as a result of recent events, the pipeline has been shelved once and for all. In fact, the talk in Europe is how to “decouple” once and for all from Russian gas (that’s if Putin doesn’t decide to turn off the tap beforehand). This is a double win for the US. Europe is likely to pivot towards the US for its gas imports as relations with Russia grow colder. And tensions with Russia have already boosted European support for Nato, which had become lukewarm in recent years. The result: the US maintains its military stranglehold over Europe.

It’s worth remembering that not too long ago Macron diagnosed Nato as being “braindead” and called for Europe to build its own common defence system. Both France and Germany reacted with the diplomatic equivalent of disgust to the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK (AUKUS). That’s a thing of the past: now European leaders are once again lining up to pledge their unconditional allegiance to Nato — and to bolster their military spending and thus their contribution to the Alliance.

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Consider Germany’s foreign policy pivot — the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have reportedly given consideration to joining Nato; Switzerland is ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets. Even Ireland, neutral for a century, is considering joining Nato. Increased military spending in Europe means more US military hardware entering the continent. Moreover, the crisis along Europe’s eastern flank, should it be prolonged, will inevitably hamper trade relations with China. For America the geopolitical view looks cloudless.

The EU’s political autonomy will be reduced, to the extent that military considerations — determined in Washington — will trump other concerns. It will now be far harder for the EU to punish countries like Poland and Hungary for alleged deficiencies in their “rule of law” given their strategic importance for Nato. As Wolfgang Streeck writes: “In short, as Western Europe is returned to “the West”, the EU is reduced to a geoeconomic utility for Nato, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help “the West” encircle Russia on its Western flank… The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status”.

That’s not to say that the crisis is not an opportunity for EU elites as well. It offers them a chance, at last, to push ahead with plans for a “common defence policy”, something Macron has been advocating for a long time. The issue had been contentious, both in Washington — where it was feared that a militarily independent Europe would be less reliant on the US – and in Berlin, which was sceptical of helping France use the EU as a cover for its global ambitions. Public opinion in Europe never embraced the idea.

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However, the conflict in Ukraine has swept away any doubts. For the first time ever, the EU is supporting member states as they supply military equipment to embattled Kyiv, mobilising €500 million under the European Peace Facility. This is a classic example of the EU’s long standing integration-through-crisis strategy: exploiting moments of public fear and disorientation to surreptitiously deepen an integration process that lacks popular support.

From the US perspective, such plans don’t represent a direct threat at the moment, so long as Europe’s military machine remains under the effective command of Nato. Whether they will create transatlantic tensions down the road remains to be seen. For the peoples of Europe, neither option is particularly appealing. Either a European army under the aegis of the US security establishment or one under the aegis of France and a remilitarised Germany? Whatever happens, arming the EU — an institution as undemocratic and oligarchic as they come — remains a bad idea. But war is a racket, as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler famously claimed, and no one wants to be left out.

Take the podcaster, Joe Rogan, whose viewership is an order of magnitude higher than primetime television and has repeatedly been the subject of controversy and attempts at censorship. If Joe Rogan had lived in North Korea or the Soviet Union, his problems would no doubt stem from the government and the lack of forbearance of people such as Kim Jong-un or Nikita Khrushchev.

In the democratic United States, however, Rogan’s problem is quite different: The Joe Rogan Show has been subject to open threats of strike action by the employees at Spotify, which distributes his podcast. Their principal demand is to be handed editorial oversight over the podcast, with the power to veto what Rogan says or does.

This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” concerned by his “history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the Covid-19 pandemic”. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. Many of those who signed were nurses or students, others were general practitioners, a few were dentists, and at least one was a licensed marriage and family therapist.

It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.

These class dynamics are hardly very subtle. Take Greta Thunberg, whose claim to fame, to put it pithily, is the fact that she refuses to go to school. While many of us can probably empathise with this desire, there is something strange about a person who hasn’t even finished high school acting like she belongs to a group of people who justify their rule through technocratic language.

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But while Greta may not really have much of a formal education, she does have rich parents, and a slew of contacts in the international NGO world. It would be foolish to think that the mere act of having a PhD would allow you to countermand someone like Greta Thunberg, even though the echelon she occupies openly ridicules the vast hordes of “deplorables” for the high crime of only having a high school diploma.

Like medieval nobles claiming a right to rule based on being a superior breed, and then openly practising inbreeding, our current elites rarely live up to their own hype. Often, the experts are stupid and wrong, sometimes to an almost comical degree. And yet they persist in trying to convince us that they deserve to rule us, and get mightily upset whenever someone dares to challenge their power. Their fixation with Joe Rogan is not hard to understand through this lens.

The investor Warren Buffet famously said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Today we can describe the political sphere with a modified version of this: there’s class war, all right, but it’s the expert class making war, and it’s not at all clear that they’re actually winning. Of course, the state plays its role here, but it’s difficult to shake the impression that it lags behind the enthusiasm and radicalism of the expert class — the students, professors, journalists and people whose work consists of writing and answering emails.

Perhaps the recent news that Sweden is forming a ”Psychological Defence Agency” in order to “safeguard democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion” gives us a sense of where the West is heading. The Swedish situation is actually far more subtle — even contradictory — than it first appears. Myndigheten för Psykologiskt Försvar (MpF) didn’t really make much of a splash in Sweden when it was announced. It was, perhaps surprisingly to any foreign observers, not even lazily condemned as a step towards 1984 or a Brave New World.

By now, everyone in Sweden is quite used to new government agencies being launched left, right and centre. If it follows in the tracks of the new agency for gender equality, which quickly devolved into a dysfunctional mess boasting more employee turnover and workplace-related sickness than an infantry brigade in World War I, the MpF is likely to become a glorified jobs programme for academic graduates, with no clear mission and an utterly broken work environment, filled with backbiting and petty office politics. In Sweden, government agencies are where political movements go to die.

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We can see this in the cultural revolution experienced by the country in the mid 2010s around the issue of migration. From 2015 to 2018, the entire Swedish expert class closed ranks, mobilised every single institution they controlled, and joined with the state in an attempt to combat “misinformation” and prevent wrongthink on the topic of immigration.

For almost a decade, the topic of immigration was transformed from one of actual material politics to one of  “competing narratives”. The idea that immigration had costs and drawbacks was reduced to a mere story, a narrative being sold by the Sweden Democrats. If the experts came together, and simply enforced the spread of a different story, anti-immigration populism could be defeated in detail.

This never came to pass, because unlike how things work in the minds of the expert class, reality isn’t just a “story”. If criminality is on the rise in your neighbourhood, and everyone knows that the criminals are newly arrived migrants, plucky attempts to fabricate rosy narratives will probably fall flat. But, as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; for most members of our “expert class”, managing the “discourse” is exactly what they are trained to do.

These agonised contortions are on full display in the United States and elsewhere on a variety of topics, from the status of the 2020 election to Covid vaccines to trans issues. Just as in Sweden in 2015, our expert class is beleaguered, desperately looking for something to stem the tide of wrongthink and rebellion from the people below them. And just as Sweden saw an exploding “alternative media” scene as a response to attempts to control the media narrative, the American experts are battling the uncomfortable fact that Joe Rogan has far more viewers than any of the channels they control.

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To illustrate just how difficult the situation is, consider the fact that something uncomfortably close to half of America currently thinks the 2020 election was not legitimate. This is a “narrative” of events that has been fought ferociously by every prestige institution in America, not to mention the state itself. And yet, all of that has failed to move the needle. Even the most frenzied attempts to control the narrative — such as the Swedish crime prevention agency engaging in a decade-long struggle to prevent anyone from researching whether certain crimes such as gang-rape displayed a similar skew along ethnic lines as in countries such as Germany — seemed to do nothing.

So while the Swedish announcement of an official state agency designed to carry on these sorts of battles might seem fairly dystopian at first blush, this is only even happening because these battles kept being lost. Again, to borrow from Warren Buffet: there’s class warfare going on, all right. But are the experts currently winning?

From my Scandinavian vantage point, it doesn’t look like victory is forthcoming. In Sweden, the activist veterans of our mostly failed cultural revolution against the ignorant deplorables are now rapidly being retired — the lucky ones shuffled off to various bureaucratic cubbyholes; the unlucky ones forced to get (horror of horrors!) real jobs.

But as with most things today, the situation is quite different abroad. In the United States, there are no peace talks forthcoming anytime soon. The desperate struggle between the expert class and those they purport to rule is likely to become even more feverish in the years ahead. For unlike the opinions and advice offered by today’s experts, which tend to be as dishonest and contradictory as any old Soviet decree, open class conflicts have a tendency to stick around.

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

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This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

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This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

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From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

In 2015, we experienced our own form of cultural revolution, with many of the same symptoms as its more potent sequels in America, Britain and elsewhere. Before “Trump derangement syndrome” was a thing, people in Sweden were denouncing each other, unpersoning each other for wrongthink, and having frenzied public struggle sessions.

At the time heterodox or dissident Swedish thinkers (a group I certainly belong to), almost regardless of political background, thought of the dramatic social and political convulsions gripping our country as stemming from something particular and unique to Sweden itself.

This collective madness gripping Sweden between 2015 and 2018 seemed so uniquely Swedish, that we assumed something akin to it would be impossible to replicate outside of our country. In 2016 and 2017, this argument made sense. The refugee crisis, supposedly the underlying cause of it all, was a Europe-wide phenomenon. Yet our Scandinavian neighbours — our historical and cultural kin — seemed unaffected. They not only took in far less refugees than we did, but also seemed immune to the political polarisation and, quite frankly, the form of social psychosis that became very common in Sweden at the time.

The cause of Sweden’s “special period”, which lasted between late 2015 and late 2018, looked (superficially) simple: the refugee crisis, and the bigger issue of immigration. In this reading, the timeline is as follows: the death of the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, and the spread of an image of his body washed ashore on a Turkish beach, helped light a humanitarian fire in Swedish society. This in turn caused increasing polarisation and anger directed at the selfish or “backsliding” Swedes who took a different position on refugees. They were too racist, too set in their ways, or too self-interested to heed the humanitarian clarion call.

In this telling, the tumultuousness of Sweden during these revolutionary years comes down to the refugee issue. The now familiar elements of a social panic that became a part of everyday life during those years, such as the public shunning of people over political disagreements, the doublespeak engaged in in order to avoid ending up as targets of social abuse, and the suppression of recent history in favour of constructing a sort of political “Year Zero” were all explained away as stemming from an overabundance of humanitarian enthusiasm. People really cared about refugees, and in their enthusiasm, things maybe got a bit out of hand. But is this really what happened?

There is a grain of truth to these claims of humanitarian enthusiasm. For a short period, donations to — and volunteers for — civil society organisations dealing with refugees exploded. Unfortunately, these explosions often turned out to be fairly shallow and counterproductive. Organisations were inundated with items like toys and clothing meant for small children, even as most of the people coming to the country were older men.

Pointing this out, however, was a risky proposition. The accusation of being a racist, and its attendant risk of social and financial ruin, loomed very large indeed. A lot of things became unspeakable during those years, including the question of demographics, to the immense financial strain that was being placed on various municipalities, to the larger question of what sort of negative consequences, the unprecedented pace and scale of migration to Sweden could lead to.

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Ironically, one of the reasons Sweden is far less polarised today than many other Western countries is probably the belated discovery that these consequences of immigration are in fact very real, and that methods of ”shaping the narrative” cannot really change material reality.

More critically, there is the realisation that nobody — certainly not middle class progressives — wants to live with those consequences at all. Crime, overcrowded schools, social and ethnic tensions, and violence toward ethnic Swedish children committed by gangs of immigrants have all conspired to cool attitudes on the subject. Indeed, the word förnedringsrån (literally “humiliation-robbery”) has now entered the Swedish lexicon as a term for robberies that display a particular sort of sadistic cruelty, where the aim of the perpetrators mostly seems to be to inflict pain and humiliation onto their victims. As such, it is hardly surprising that the recent fall of Kabul to the Taliban was not in fact met with calls to increase Sweden’s humanitarian commitment, but rather with conspicuous silence, except for a speech by Prime Minister Löfven promising that the country would “never return to the days of 2015”.

With the benefit of hindsight, immigration now appears not as a question important in and of itself, but as a form of wedge corresponding to a very particular political moment of establishment fear and anger at parts of their own electorate. The Right populist Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010, but many were convinced they were a passing fad that would soon be gone. In 2014, however, they had more than doubled their vote share, becoming the third biggest party in the Riksdag. This caused an immense amount of political anxiety among the “chattering classes” in the weeks and months following the election, in a preview of the shock caused by Donald Trump.

Sweden entered a political and social state of exception similar to the one experienced by the US after the 2016 election. Rather than an explosion of blind humanitarianism, the way the refugee crisis affected Sweden should probably be better understood as an explosion of political anxiety of the urban middle classes.

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The radical Left is now extinct

By Malcom Kyeyune

The battle lines drawn up during the refugee crisis were very simple: on the one hand, you had the deplorables (though this term was not yet in use in 2015). They were the enemy. They hated immigrants, gays, and women. This hatred didn’t stem from being the losers of a particular set of economic policies. No, the “hatred” of “those people” came from a general odiousness, lack of education and moral fibre. The professional and managerial classes who opposed the plebs cast themselves as friends and allies of humanity itself.

Sweden was a portal into the future. The intense polarisation of 2015-2018 followed the now extremely familiar Western pattern of rural vs urban, “anywheres” vs “somewheres”. In 2015, the real fear and hatred of the (mostly imaginary) SD-voting country bumpkin could suddenly, miraculously be drawn in stark terms: good versus evil, humanitarianism versus selfishness.

But now, years later, we can see that these battle lines were a fantasy. The narratives of uneducated deplorables meanly trying to keep their children from interacting with immigrants have been replaced by the reality: Swedish middle-class families go to great lengths to avoid their own kids mixing with immigrants in school. They worry about the academic implications — not to mention the risk of violence and disorder — of letting the immigrants into “their” schools. Sweden’s permissive system of private charter schools, though often attacked for reflecting some sort of neoliberal logic, is in practice a way for many parents to self-segregate their children.

Sweden, being a historically egalitarian and homogenous country, never engaged in city planning meant to keep the poor from meeting the rich. The ability of the middle-classes to isolate themselves from the less desirable consequences of immigration has collapsed; with people living in extremely well-to-do neighbourhoods such as Stockholm’s Strandvägen now complaining about street racing, thefts, and drug dealing out in the open.

As a result, some of the fighters for the acceptance of refugees during the crisis years have later partaken in or even led local protests against mixing immigrant and native born students in the same schools. A decision taken in Trollhättan to bus kids from migrant areas to other schools met fierce protests in late 2020. One of the leaders of this revolt? The former liberal party politician, Rita Svensson, who had been on the record in 2016 as advocating for students to be given bus cards in order to break segregation.

Identifying the cause of fighting the deplorables with the cause of accepting immigrants backfired for the urban middle-classes. They find themselves caught between two imperatives. On one hand, the political ”interlopers” who do not share their own sensibilities (or their naked class interests) that have so ominously been ”emboldened” by the Sweden Democrats, represent a threat to the natural political order. Just like in the UK, everyone blithely accepted that globalisation’s losers would have ”no other choice” but to vote for the same parties that engineered their dispossession. On the other hand the middle-classes have discovered, like the parents of Trollhättan, that they do not like the consequences of migration. Their genteel humanitarianism has vanished.

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Today Sweden’s cultural revolution finds itself in an odd spot. An uneasy ceasefire prevails in Swedish society now. While the deplorables are still mocked, there is no bite to it anymore. SD voters are no longer at risk of having their careers cancelled. In 2021, an unspoken attitude of ”don’t ask, don’t tell” prevails.

In the areas in Stockholm where most of the country’s journalists live, it is probably less awkward to openly admit to sympathising with SD on immigration than it is to proudly proclaim that Sweden is far from full and ought to take in at least a million more Afghans in the next couple of years. The hard, eliminationist edge of Swedish politics is mostly gone; wrongthinkers should perhaps be subtweeted on Twitter, but they shouldn’t necessarily be fired, driven out into the wilderness, or subjected to violence.

In some ways, this turn toward ”moderation” in Swedish politics is a good thing. Outside of the inner core of the progressive sphere, such as NGOs and universities, you can no longer be summarily fired for sympathising with a party that has the support of between a fourth and a fifth of the nation. The radicals are slowly abandoning their old cancel culture methods, in favour of such quaint notions as having democratic debate (the horror!).

But it’s doubtful that the Swedish example ought to inspire optimism elsewhere. After 2014 the “losers of globalism” made their play for political relevance, pitting themselves against the urban middle-classes who dominated the political scene. A year later, those same urban middle-classes had declared a no holds barred war against the “enemy within”. In Sweden’s case, the casus belli of that war — accepting a historically unprecedented amount of refugees in a very short time, without contemplating the consequences of doing so — created a situation where the issues of immigrant crime, cultural shock, and ethnic violence became more odious than the deplorables themselves.

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Sweden was in many ways the first Western country to noisily declare war on a growing segment of its own population. In 2015, the social madness gripping the country made it seem like a fairly unique outlier, briefly confirming the deeply held national exceptionalism that makes up part of our country’s national ideology.

Today, it is clear that Sweden was simply the canary in the coal mine; just a couple of years later, many other Western countries would noisily be at war with their own homegrown ”deplorables”. Political demonisation against the internal enemy continues to grow. “The unmasked”; “the unvaxxinated”; “chuds”; “magatards”; “Brexiteers”. All of these labels, as it turns out, are incredibly malleable and thus politically useful.

And while that war has at least temporarily cooled down in Sweden itself, the way in which it did so looks likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

He contended that the difference in infection and death rates between countries would come out in the wash, regardless of their lockdown policies and promised to return in a year’s time to review the evidence.

But he makes no bones about his mistakes. When I remind him of his prediction that countries would end up with similar results after a year, he readily concedes he was mistaken. “One of the things I got wrong a year ago is the rate of spread of this disease. I thought it would spread quicker. And I also thought it would be more similar in different countries. We can see now that there are big differences in the rates of spread in between countries. It may have to do with lockdown, it may have to do with cultural things in these countries. But there is a big difference between countries.”

The difference that is most commonly cited in the ‘case for the prosecution’ against the Swedish strategy is the following chart showing Sweden’s deaths per million dramatically exceeding its neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This is generally considered solid proof that the Swedish strategy failed.

Johan Giesecke disagrees: “The differences between Sweden and its neighbours are much bigger than people realise from the outside — different systems, different cultural traditions…If you compare Sweden to other European countries [such as the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium] it’s the other way round. On the ranking of excess mortality, Sweden is somewhere in the middle or below the middle of European countries. So I think it’s really Norway and Finland that are the outliers more than Sweden.”

Explaining what he means by cultural differences, he mentions among other factors that “they’re more sparsely populated. There are less people per square kilometre in these two countries. There are also much fewer people who  were born outside Europe living in these two countries.”

So, crucially, if Sweden had instituted a hard lockdown and shut the border earlier, would its death rate have been closer to its Nordic neighbours? “Maybe not,” he says, “I think we would still have more deaths than they have.”

He is also fairly dismissive of charts currently showing that Sweden has the highest level of infection in Europe:

“I don’t think you should compare countries now, while we are still in the pandemic. You should wait until the pandemic has receded before we start comparing countries. If you did that chart a month ago it would be very different. And a month from now? I don’t know but it would be very different. These snapshots may not show the whole truth.”

Compared to the UK, Sweden ranks 23 in the world in terms of Covid deaths per million, and the UK ranks 11 —so on the most important measure of all, Sweden has had a better result. In fact, as the above chart shows there are strikingly similar patterns of deaths over the past 12 months in the two countries.

“They’re very similar,” says Gieseke, “And yet one of the countries has had three severe lockdowns and the other has only had voluntary or mostly voluntary measures. That tells us something I think.”

What does it tell us?

“That lockdowns may not be a very useful tool in the long run.”

Watch the original interview

Did Sweden get Covid wrong?

By UnHerd

In our first interview, the Professor speculated that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) could be as low as 0.1% and that over 50% of people would shortly be revealed to have already had the virus once antibody testing became widespread.

We now know that the IFR for countries like the UK and Sweden is between 0.5% and 0.9% and that antibody testing has persistently revealed disappointingly small prevalence. Even now, after tens of millions of people have had Covid in the UK and a further 32 million have been vaccinated, antibodies are only estimated to be present in 55% of people.

“Two things I really got wrong (there are probably more things, but two big things). One is that the vaccine came so fast. I had no idea that we would have a vaccine within a year… The other thing is the rate of spread — I overestimated it, I thought it would spread much faster than it did.”

Giesecke was critical, last year, of Prof Neil Ferguson’s forecasts of up to 510,000 deaths in the UK from an unmitigated epidemic, 250,000 from a mitigated epidemic and as few as 20,000 with a suppression strategy. But with over 130,000 deaths in the UK, I ask, Ferguson’s numbers don’t look so wrong any more, do they?

“You may be right,” he concedes. “There is quite a difference between half a million and 130,000 — but, yep.” Put together, I suggest, these errors — a wrong estimate of the fatalities, the wrong percentage of people infected and an overly pessimistic expectation of the vaccine roll out — add up to getting the overall picture very wrong. So does that mean that his rejection of lockdowns at that stage was wrong, too?

“No. Sweden has had rather severe restrictions, but we based them on voluntary participation by the inhabitants instead of using laws and police. A lot of people in the world seem to think that Sweden did nothing about the Covid pandemic. That’s wrong. The entire population changed their way of living and it had profound effects on daily life for millions of Swedes, even though you weren’t fined if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I would still advocate the Swedish model, even knowing all that.”

Although he concedes that some lives may have been saved, he believes that the successes of the Swedish approach over the past year should be considered in the balance:

“Look at the good things with the Swedish system…. One is the schools: we are not destroying the future for classes of children. Another is that Sweden kept to its international agreements — for example in the EU you are not supposed to close your borders with other countries, but that has happened in several countries in Europe. We have made it possible for small businesses like cafes or bicycle shops to survive the pandemic. We have kept democracy. We have trusted people. I think there are a number of benefits from not having a severe lockdown and more of them will come as we do research on this in the future.”

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A year ago, Giesecke predicted that inhabitants of a democracy would swiftly tire of lockdown, and that long-term house arrest was not a viable option. But as it turned out, the policy remained highly popular among the majority across Europe for most of the period.

“People were willing to give up more freedom than I thought they would. It worries me — there are many democratic rules and freedoms that have been curtailed. I think that may be one of the dangerous results of this pandemic.”

He regrets the recent legislation in Sweden that makes lockdowns constitutionally possible for the future. “There is a new law — a pandemic law — which gives the Government more power than it had before, and curtails part of the freedom of the Swedish population… It’s shifted power away from parliament to some extent, which is a new thing in Sweden at least in peacetime.”

Looking to the future, Giesecke can see various scenarios playing out:

“The virus may mutate so it becomes less pathogenic than it is now. It may be that it comes back in a new shape every autumn. And it may be that we’ll all have to take a new coronavaccine every year, tailored for that strain. But it is here to stay — we won’t get rid of it.”

Which is not to say the pandemic heralds the beginning of a “new normal”, or is part of a “great reset”. In fact, he is confident that the old normal will return. Once vaccinated, he believes people should return to normal:

“If you are vaccinated with two doses and wait the right number of weeks, then… you should be able to live like you did before the pandemic. This disease is sometimes seen as something supernatural, mystical, mythical — but it’s a viral disease like all other diseases. More dangerous than some of them, but it’s not unique, Covid. So a proper vaccine used correctly protects you and means that you don’t infect other people as well…. No vaccine is 100% effective, but we don’t have this discussion about any other vaccine.”

He has been vaccinated with the AstraZeneca jab, and would be happy for  everyone to take it: “If we really want to get down to small numbers — we won’t eradicate it, but to small numbers — then I think even children should be vaccinated… I can’t see why not.”

Giesecke had a long and prestigious career at the top of international medicine. Does he regret joining the debate so publicly, and becoming such a controversial figure?

“I hope I have done some useful things for the Swedish population. If it has been useful for me or not… the discussion in Sweden has been very politicised and very divisive.”

He believes that history will judge him kindly.

“I think I got most of the things right, actually.”

But as a result of this collective reticence, discussion surrounding this issue has often been isolated to two extremes. On the one hand, it has been dominated by the populist Right. In response to the Cologne sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve 2015-16, for example, German supporters of Alternative für Deutschland rioted and called for mass deportations. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the response of many European liberals and progressives has been that of the three wise monkeys: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

But why should this debate be restricted to these two extremes? Surely good social science requires that rigorous empirical research can be carried out on complex phenomena, particularly when it is controversial and politically sensitive. After all, only then can they be better understood, and public policy measures be appropriately formulated and targeted.

When carrying out research for my new book Prey, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of reliable data on almost every aspect of the problematic relationship between mass migration and sexual violence. Statistics were either a tangle of changing definitions of “sexual assault” or — in the case of a number of countries, including Sweden — they weren’t available at all.

That has now changed thanks to the work of the social scientists Ardavan Khoshnood, Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist. In a recent issue of the journal Forensic Sciences Research, they published a paper on “Swedish rape offenders”, in which they analyse the characteristics of individuals between 15-60 years old who were convicted of “rape+” against women in Sweden between 2000 and 2015. The term “rape+” here refers to both acts of rape and attempted rape, including aggravated cases.

The researchers found that, within that time-frame, a total of 3,039 offenders were convicted of rape+ against a woman in Sweden — nearly all of whom (99.7%) were men. According to the researchers, Swedish-born offenders with Swedish-born parents accounted for 40.8% of the offenders. But, strikingly, almost half of the offenders were born outside of Sweden (47.7%). Of those foreign-born offenders, 34.5% were from the Middle East/North Africa, with 19.1% hailing from the rest of Africa. As a percentage of all convicted perpetrators, therefore, 16.4% were foreign-born individuals from the Middle East/North Africa, and 9.1% were foreign-born individuals from Africa (excluding North Africa).

How far does this signify over-representation? On the basis of population records kept by the official agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), approximately 20% (19.7%) of the Swedish population are foreign-born individuals. Among those convicted of rape and perpetrated rape, the foreign-born account for 47.7% of those convicted — so they are over-represented by a factor of 2.4.

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Moreover, if we piece various statistics together, we find there are 565,902 foreign-born people living in Sweden who were born in North Africa and the Middle East, representing 4.9% of Sweden’s population. Yet 16.4% of those convicted of rape and attempted rape are foreign-born individuals from North Africa and the Middle East: over-representation by a factor of 3.3. And that figure rises to 4.7 when you consider all foreign-born citizens from Africa (excluding North Africa.)

Such statistics must, of course, be handled with care. There are, after all, several risks that need to be weighed up when it comes to such a sensitive and politically fraught subject. The first, and perhaps most obvious, lies in condemning entire groups, with whole categories of persons deemed “guilty” based on the criminal behaviour of a few. I think that is a mistake, ethically and analytically, not least because the overwhelming majority of foreign-born men living in Sweden are not guilty of crimes. It goes without saying that the group as a whole cannot be condemned for the actions of a very small percentage.

The second risk, however, is to take the complete opposite approach; to dismiss the link from migration to sexual violence through excessive relativisation. In Germany, for example, an official report warned that since not all criminal suspects are identified, comparisons between population groups are not possible. The report then noted that non-Germans living in Germany are more likely to be male, poorer, less educated, and more likely to live in urban areas. All of these characteristics, the report’s authors cautioned, are associated or correlated with criminal behaviour in general, making it impossible — these criminologists say — to draw meaningful comparisons about the higher prevalence of non-Germans in criminal cases.

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But such an approach is not only naïve; it also ignores the existence of a wider trend. The Swedish authors themselves state that their conclusions “are in line with previous Swedish studies… [and] are also in line with international studies from, among others, Switzerland, as well as Sweden’s neighbouring countries Norway, Finland and Denmark.”

The documented over-representation across countries, and over an extended period of time, therefore, offers real grounds for concern. To discuss this issue is not to pit “foreign” against “native,” nor to ascribe collective guilt. It is to explore, as carefully as possible, the nature of sexual violence taking place today in order to defend the basic rights of all women in Europe. At the very least, we have to take seriously the possibility that certain divergent norms based on flawed assumptions about women’s sexuality, be they cultural or religious in origin, play a role in these crimes. An over-representation of this magnitude cannot simply be attributed to socio-economic disadvantage, alienation or youthful aggression.

But a third risk of analysing sexual assault must also be mentioned: the difficulty of examining it from a criminological point of view. Some will caution that the figures in the Swedish study pertain only to individuals who were convicted — and therefore ignore the many cases of rape that are not reported to police to begin with, or those where there is insufficient evidence to establish, in a court of law, whether a suspect is guilty.

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Could it be that foreign-born individuals in Sweden are singled out for prosecutions of rape and attempted rape by authorities? Or could it be that victims of rape and attempted rape in Sweden disproportionately report crimes in which the perpetrators are foreign-born? Thus far, the jury is out — though I have found no persuasive evidence to substantiate either of these hypotheses.

Whatever truth, one thing we do know is that European statistics on the characteristics of sexual offenders currently form a complex, disparate set of data; they are often difficult to locate, sometimes shrouded in secrecy. Data on perpetrators are especially few and far between. And that can be dangerous. For where information is inaccessible or obscure, the most outlandish theories can flourish in the darker corners of the internet, where the constraints of responsible editing, much less peer review, are non-existent.

The authors of this Swedish study have therefore performed a valuable service in shining a light on an excruciatingly painful topic. We can only hope that it serves as a model to researchers in other European countries, so that more effective measures can be developed to safeguard the rights of all women, foreign-born and native alike. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” is not a legitimate policy response to a wave of criminality that has ruined or marred the lives of tens of thousands of people.

But this wilful ignorance was best captured in another call to arms that also celebrates its 75^th anniversary this year: that of George F Kennan’s “Long Telegram” on the sources of Soviet conduct, which was received by the State Department in February 1946. Written by Kennan under the pseudonym ‘Mr X’, the Telegram was an attempt to bore through the layers of ignorance, foolish optimism and disinformation spread by local Communists and Soviet sympathisers. He hoped to mobilise his fellow foreign service officers in the State Department and their chiefs, and through them the press and then Congress, to “contain” the further spread of Stalin’s power across Europe. Kennan had to estrange the USSR in order to make his colleagues and the wider world see its threat.

Today, foreign policy leaders have attempted to exhume the memory of Kennan’s Long Telegram to evoke comparisons with our own confrontation with the Communist Party of China. I had a few conversations with George Kennan in 1973-74, and while I do not recall him as much given to humour, I am pretty sure that he would have found the comparison risibly absurd.

Take the influential Atlantic Council’s “Longer Telegram”. It mournfully begins by asserting that the United States “has so far had no… strategy with regard to China. This is a dereliction of national responsibility”. That is total nonsense: the one problem the Trump administration did confront systematically was China’s aggression abroad and repression at home, to such good effect that the Biden Administration reaffirmed every single one of his policies on China.

Kennan would also have ridiculed the very first operational recommendation: “US strategy and policy toward China must be laser-focused on the fault lines among Xi and his inner circle.” Back in 1946, the inner politics of Stalin’s court were totally secret and the same is true of Xi’s party today — with total centralisation very few protagonists are in the know, and they all have better ways of committing suicide than to talk.

Finally, there is the point where Kennan would have risen in hilarity from a chortle to a guffaw: “The foremost goal of US strategy should be to cause China’s ruling elites to conclude that it is in China’s best interests to continue operating within the US-led liberal international order….” You might as well try to sell them beach holidays in the Gobi desert:  Xi’s global policy is driven precisely by the realisation that China’s Communist Party cannot survive unless democracy is viewed as the plaything of rich Anglo-Saxon exploiters, while everyone else prefers authoritarian rule.

We all know what Xi Jinping is made of. While the Long Telegram was necessary to estrange Stalin’s Soviet Union, no such effort is needed to awaken the US to the People’s Republic of China. China’s own leadership has done all the awakening that is necessary since the rise of Xi Jinping to supreme, almost Mao-like power. Xi has publicly proclaimed the imminence of China’s industrial superiority, and strived to achieve it via the largest industrial espionage offensive in history. Last year, the FBI’s Director disclosed that it was tracking almost a thousand Chinese attempts to steal civil and military technologies, or commercial secrets.

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Add to all this the calculatedly arrogant tone of Chinese diplomacy since Xi Jinping’s rise to power — they call it “wolf” diplomacy — in countries as varied as Canada (following the detention of Huawei CFO for extradition hearings in the US), Sweden ( which was warned to treat Chinese citizens with greater respect after a rowdy family had been ejected from a hotel) and Australia (which was presented with a long list of demands including an end to Human Rights complaints and a stop to strategic research on China).

Finally, there is the relentless accumulation of Chinese military strength, funded by a still growing economy, whose more visible elements include a growing fleet whose combat value matters less than the symbolism of such a direct challenge to American power in the Pacific.

This information reached the American public in fragments, but what came through was enough to shift attitudes in the US from optimism to weary vigilance, and then from growing approval for counter-measures to active support for safeguards  in every sector. Even in elite universities, fewer learned fools rush to the defence of fellow academics arrested for passing US-funded high-tech research to their Chinese handlers. Today, it’s almost universally acknowledged that agents of the Guoanbu — China’s Ministry of State Security — attempt to recruit every single China-born US citizen known to have access to valuable technological information (recent cases ranged from jet engine designs to genetically engineered soya beans).

Though the US doesn’t need to be to awakened to the threat of China, Kennan’s Telegram does have one useful lesson for us: the importance of overcoming provincialism.

Kennan had to wake up a distant America which still trusted Stalin’s promises to the grim events unfolding in Eastern Europe. This time, American provincialism is manifest in the credence given to American-centered explanations for what has happened to US-Chinese relations. The most widely circulated example of this is to point to America’s straightforward “hegemonic jealousy”, whereby the United States, today’s number one global power, is doing all it can one to preserve its primacy by pressing back against the CCP. A cruder variant I have heard in China, but which has certainly also appeared in the West, blames White racism for the refusal to accept the rise of the Han nation.

Some might find these explanations plausible, but there is a logical reason why no American-centered theory makes sense. Relations between the People’s Republic of China and every other country of any importance (except Russia) have evolved on exactly the same trajectory as its relationship with the US: from cooperative, even friendly relations to increasing suspicion, followed by vigorous defensive reactions.

Moreover, these reversals from amity to hostility have occurred on the same timetable, or near enough. That cannot be a coincidence. Nor are those countries US dependencies, whose relations with Beijing were ruined at Washington’s orders, an untrue proposition but particularly absurd in India’s case, whose non-alignment even had an Anti-American tinge to it. When, in 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s state visit to Beijing and the major joint programs then announced inspired heady talk of “Chindia”, influential Indian figures argued that their country had to “wean itself” off American temptations to get into bed with Beijing. But what ensued was the opposite: the joint programs never happened but border incidents did — with territorial claims asserted once again and “Chindia” cast into ridicule.

In the case of Australia, when the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007, the “broadening and deepening” of Sino-Australian relations accelerated. Australian exports to China rose every year to reach 30% of Australia’s total. Meanwhile, everything Chinese was welcome, including Chinese purchases of Australian firms, housing and agricultural lands. The Chinese tourists that arrived in ever-growing numbers were uniquely valuable, not least because they stayed away from the over-visited Great Barrier Reef, instead preferring harmless sightseeing, shopping, and even more profitable gambling.

Australia’s welcome extended to the Hanban, the Chinese Language Council which opened “Confucius Institutes” in several Australian universities, operated by Chinese personnel who not only provided Chinese language teaching but also helped university administrators to handle the ever-increasing influx of students from China. Australian travel to China was also much facilitated by the opening of consular offices in six Australian cities (the United States only had four), which also provided services for the increasing number of Chinese students and immigrants.

Everything is different now. Yes, if Chinese gamblers arrive, they would still be welcomed, and China can still import all the Australian raw materials it wants. But Chinese attempts to purchase Australian firms are now very closely examined and mostly denied, and all the Confucius Institutes in New South Wales have been closed after it became clear that they were propaganda outlets whose staff compelled Chinese students to function as their agents, to shout down Hong Kong protesters for example.

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Most dramatic is the changed strategic attitude to China, from Kevin Rudd’s confidence that Beijing was willing “to make a strong contribution to strengthening the regional security environment and the global rules-based order” to a rising sense of insecurity that already in 2011 induced the Australian government to invite US Marines to train in their country. Not just once either, but on a prolonged basis with increasingly permanent facilities in Darwin. That was a response to China’s claims to some three million square kilometers of ocean waters that extend very far from China and very close to the coasts of Australia’s neighbours — claims rejected as entirely baseless by the Law of the Sea arbitration court.

The off-duty Marines in Darwin are the most visible evidence that Australia now views China as a strategic threat. The least visible is Australia’s “strategic dialogue” with Vietnam, China’s most resolute opponent and favourite target (Vietnamese fishing boats are regularly attacked by Chinese vessels), with “strategic” an euphemism for intelligence; the Vietnamese contribute ground intelligence while Australia shares satellite intelligence released by its Five Eyes partners.

The Chinese have since retaliated, applying the logic of war in the medium of commerce with import blockages that exploit the dependence of Australian exporters on the Chinese market. Only last November, Beijing leaked 14 demands as their conditions for the restoration of normal trade relations, starting with the opening of the Australian telecom market to Huawei and extending to the dismantling of Australian security measures across the board, as well as an end to Australian statements on Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan and “unfriendly” media coverage of China.

In the case of Japan, the reversal in relations with China was a good deal more abrupt, and again it was entirely unrelated to US-China dynamics. At the start of the financial crisis in 2009, Sino-Japanese relations had improved so much that Japan’s Minister of Defence Hamada Yasukazu visited Beijing to sign a comprehensive set of agreements covering extensive information-sharing arrangements, an overall “maritime contact mechanism”, mutual naval visits, a very extensive schedule of high-level meetings and joint military exercises. The US-Japan security relationship seemed to be in danger.

But on 7 September, 2010, the Chinese trawler Minjinyu 5179, one of many fishing in Senkaku’s waters, collided with two Japanese coastguard patrol vessels. Its skipper was drunk, but when he was duly detained, Japan’s ambassador in Beijing was summoned to the Foreign Ministry where he was told that Japan should stop operating its coastguard in the entire Senkaku archipelago. A nationwide campaign of incitement led by the Chinese Foreign Ministry generated vast protests in front of the Japanese embassy with demands for the immediate handover of the archipelago.

Soon it was rumoured that Japan’s advanced manufacturing would be strangled by Chinese threats to stop the supply of rare earth metals, which are indispensable for high-tech industries. Japan’s response had to await the accession of Shinzo Abe to the premiership in December 2012. By the time he resigned eight years later , he had roundly rejected China’s territorial claims, and had strengthened Japan’s national security structure along with the US alliance.

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Likewise the UK, which only a few years ago under David Cameron was pursuing a privileged “Golden Age” relationship with China, started contending with its technology thefts and its threat to global security. Along with India, Japan, Australia and many others, it will continue to do so, regardless of who is in the White House.

In the end, there is no need for another Kennan, or another Long Telegram. There is no need to invoke Thucydides when Goethe’s Faust is quite sufficient. Xi Jinping’s China is bent on world domination, starting with the international institutions that one-by-one cease to uphold Western values.

But because China threatens a few countries while seducing many more, what we do emphatically need is another George Marshall. More than any other individual, Marshall built up the Alliance that successfully resisted the Soviet Union, precisely by subordinating military priorities to a comprehensive economic plan that defeated its ideology by drastically accelerating the recovery of war-wrecked Europe.

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This time, there has to be a better response to Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, which is building ports, highways and rail lines around the world. The current global response amounts to little more than quoting Proverbs 22:7 — “the borrower is slave to the lender” — to countries desperately in need of investment. The World Bank has degenerated into a provider of very high tax-free salaries to employees who hold up even modest projects with impossible environmental, indigenous rights and rate-of-return demands.

So, there is room for a “strategic infrastructures” initiative by the US and Japan with Australia, Canada, India the UK, and other members of the China-containment coalition. To cite a very obvious example, a Calcutta-Haiphong road and rail project would provide a horizontal alternative to China’s north-south influence vectors for Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Laos while connecting India and Vietnam, who are already cooperating at sea to resist China.

At a time when Mr Musk can invest $1 billion in the digital abstraction of bitcoin, a “coalition bank” should be able to outcompete China’s investments. George Kennan managed to wake the world up to the threat of the Soviet Union. Our leaders are awake to China. Truly ambitious action on a Marshall-like scale must follow.

The homes are not divided by fences, but sit at a respectful distance from each other, never in a row but each positioned in a particular spot of the owner’s choosing; there’s a harmony of style which still leaves room for individuation — some houses are yellow, some red, some slightly more modern, some slightly more traditional, but each adorned with a well-kept garden, a boat-house and pier, and of course a Swedish flag. It’s a vision of the Good Life, Swedish-style.

Since its lockdown-free response to Covid-19, Sweden has suddenly found itself the pin-up nation for libertarians worldwide, who see in its more laissez-faire response a defence of individual freedom and self-governance above all else. But Sweden is not a libertarian society — far from it; in reality, they are sticklers for the rules. Try putting decking on the seaside edge of your garden, or buying alcohol from anywhere other than the state monopoly — you will be met with restrictions that would be unthinkable in either Britain or the United States.

The picturesque scene in front of me speaks of a culture that some might even find oppressive. It’s the polar opposite of, say, the pleasure coasts of Florida, where sprawling mansions butt up against each other without reference to any communal style: ionic columns next to modernist glass boxes, each shouting its own taste and values in a cacophony of individualism.

So how should we understand this paradox? Six months into the Covid-19 era, Sweden remains mask-free; most businesses and schools stayed open throughout, never closing for a single day. You could argue that their more laissez-faire policy was an accident of their more independent health agency or the personality of state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, but despite a higher death toll than neighbouring countries, and some slippage over time in support, the policy remains widely popular (especially now it seems to be working so well, with case numbers and deaths falling to very low levels). As a half-Swede half-Brit, to me it feels deeply connected to the quirks of Swedish culture.

In particular, the Swedish example helps to correct a philosophical error that dominates the Covid-19 debate in the UK and the US: that if you are resistant to draconian policies to counter the pandemic, you must be a die-hard libertarian— at best, devoted to individual freedom over the common good, at worst, straightforwardly selfish. I believe Sweden shows how the opposite can be true: it is precisely because the Swedes want to preserve the common good and are proud of their shared way of life that they have been reluctant to infringe it.

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Why we aren't wearing masks in Sweden

By Freddie Sayers

I’d go further. The fragmented and highly individualistic culture of the UK and US, without much by way of universally shared values to fall back on, is a big part of why the response in those countries has been so uncertain and the debate so poisonous. Without habits and values that are commonly deemed morally good and too precious to give up, what remains when a new threat such as Covid-19 arrives? If the only unassailable moral good is saving lives, the “precautionary principle” becomes almost impossible to argue against. Well-meaning people find they have surrendered their whole way of life to its dubious authority.

So what are these other virtues, embodied in the Swedish flag that flies in every garden? To help explain I’d like to introduce you to three Swedish words, none of which has an adequate English translation, but all of which are evident in the scene in front of me.

The first is a verb, to njuta (pronounced nyoota). Most dictionaries will translate this as “enjoy” but it means more than that — something closer to “take pleasure in and give praise for the gifts of creation”. It’s what the summer houses opposite me were built for, and most of them are barely 100 years old. In a land of long, dark winters and a harsh climate, in which life was very hard for most people until very recently, the ability to njuta is a precarious civilisational achievement, something to defend and not feel guilty about.

In our Anglo culture, taking pleasure in life, even wholesomely, has become so mixed in with issues of guilt and privilege that it is considered a luxury more than a moral good. You wouldn’t catch the British or American equivalents of Anders Tegnell seriously discussing the importance of Easter skiing holidays or graduation parties for school leavers, as he did. In the debate in the UK, pubs are put in simplistic opposition to schools as a “nice to have” as opposed to a necessity, and ministers score virtue points for cancelling their holidays.

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What we can learn from the Swedish paradox

By Freddie Sayers

In Swedish to njuta av vad gott är, or “take pleasure in what is good”, has an almost holy overtone —the phrase is actually a quote from the Swedish translation of Ecclesiastes 3:13. It’s not an elite pursuit: fully 20% of Swedes own summer houses, and there are plenty of public boats and beaches for families to enjoy the brief summer months, just as there are widely observed aesthetic traditions in the winter.

If the beauty and joy of life carries moral weight, it follows that things like lockdowns and universal mask-wearing will require more compelling evidence than has so far been forthcoming to win the argument. “Might as well” is not enough; if they can get by without them (which they are, increasingly successfully) they will.

The second word is more of a legal concept, but gets to the heart of the Swedish understanding of freedom as a core part of the common good: allemansrätt, meaning something like “everyone’s right to roam”. This is the real reason why there are no fences separating those summer houses. Effectively there is no law of trespass: no rich landlord can fence people off their patch of earth, every citizen has the legal right to walk anywhere they like, to pick flowers or simply enjoy the scenery.

Yet this freedom comes with clear limits: you may not disturb someone’s garden or come uncomfortably close to their house or pick their produce. It is the expression in law, universally understood, of freedom-within-limits, or frihet under eget ansvar, that in other countries is generally confined to classes in political philosophy. The Swedes are fond of their freedoms, but they are as fond of the limits to them that protect their society.

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The attitudes I saw both in Stockholm and in the rural county of Dalarna over the past weeks were not in the least bit reckless. If your mental image is that of Vikings, swinging from the rafters and pretending Covid-19 doesn’t exist, you’d be dead wrong. In the supermarkets, Swedes are careful to observe social distancing, particularly with older people; at the restaurants and bars there is a queue outside until seats become available (there’s a table-service only rule in place). In the spirit of allemansrätt, people are behaving responsibly but choosing their own path.

Their behaviour is best described by a third uniquely Swedish word, which despite being something of a Swedish cliché it would feel odd to leave out: lagom, meaning “just so” or “neither too much nor too little”. If there is a national characteristic it is surely this — the highest virtue in a culture where excess is frowned upon and rashness is considered dangerous. It explains why, despite a huge number of wealthy people, there are relatively few over-the-top mega mansions in the Stockholm archipelago.

It also helps explain the Swedish policy response to Covid-19 — banning gatherings over 50, encouraging home working and social distancing, shielding of vulnerable groups, while keeping society as open as possible — which can be seen as typically lagom. It was designed to be proportionate to the threat, but unhysterical, and sustainable over the long term. To rip up a long-prepared pandemic plan and impose unprecedented measures just because everybody else was would be considered reckless; to close schools would have been considered morally unacceptable.

It is notable that Anders Tegnell, who in our interview last week comes across as a perfect exemplar of unflappable lagom, naturally uses the vocabulary of the Left. The rationale behind his strategy he couches in egalitarian terms — closing schools, for example, would put unacceptable pressure on poorer and single parents as well as hitting disadvantaged children hardest, just as more dramatic lockdowns would most impact the poorest and most vulnerable in society. His most vocal critics tend to be from the Right, who see him as an intransigent technocrat standing in the way of more effective action.

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Of course, the same left-liberal spirit I have described is shared to varying degrees across Scandinavia and the North Sea region. But the idea that Sweden’s approach was opposite to its neighbours is simply not true. In our interview with Norwegian health chief Camilla Stoltenberg, she was at pains to emphasise how similar to Sweden the short Norwegian lockdown was in reality, and in a recent interview the German health minister Jens Spahn insisted the German lockdown was “much closer to Sweden than Spain”.

As for Denmark, many Swedes put that country’s rush to close borders in response to the pandemic down to the anti-immigration version of the Social Democrats who currently hold power there. And the list of European countries where there is still no facemask mandate and very few people wearing them includes Denmark alongside Sweden, Norway, Finland and Holland. Clearly, something cultural is going on.

Njuta, allemansrätt, lagom — what are our equivalent values in Britain or the United States? Sweden has all sorts of problems, not least the political instability associated with high levels of immigration. But whether or not their approach to Covid-19 will be vindicated by the numbers, its consistency in the face of enormous pressure and international criticism makes a striking contrast to the jumpy and acrimonious debate in the UK and, even more so, the US. It strikes me as more a sign of cultural strength than weakness, and there’s really nothing “libertarian” about it.

After all these months, does he now think that his strategy is a failure or a success? A bit of both, he says quickly, but emphasises more of the latter:

“I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of the disease has been limited.

The failure has of course been the death toll … that has been very much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities.”

Mortality is hardly an afterthought — so why is Sweden’s mortality rate so high? At around 550 per million of population, it sits just under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries; he believes the Swedish counting system for deaths has been more stringent than elsewhere; also, countries are at different points in the epidemic cycle so it is too early to compare totals.

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The one thing he doesn’t mention in this list is that Sweden, uniquely in Europe, did not impose a mandatory lockdown at any point. Is he really claiming that this is not even a factor?

“I am not sure that it is easy to say that lockdown would make the difference … in many ways we have had a very stringent lockdown in Sweden. We have cut down on movement in society quite a lot: we have compared how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, and the decrease in travel is the same in Sweden as in neighbouring countries … In many ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think complete lockdown is the way to go for all countries … the rapidly declining cases we see in Sweden right now is another indication that you can get the number of cases down quite a lot in a country without having a complete lockdown.”

I ask again: is he claiming that lockdowns make no difference?

“We don’t know. It would have made maybe some difference, we don’t know. But on the other hand we know that lockdowns also have big other effects on public health. We know that closing schools has a great effect on children’s health in the short and the long term. We know that people being out of work also produces a lot of problems in the public health area. So we also have to look at what are the negative effect of lockdowns, and that has not been done very much so far.”

Tegnell points out the huge differences between different areas in Sweden — parts of the South that have had much lower Covid-19 than Copenhagen just over the water while Stockholm has had it much worse, despite the same lockdown policy nationwide. This he puts down to the volume of original introduction of the disease due to international travel:

“There seems to be a close connection to how many people introduced the disease at the same time… The spring holidays in Sweden are spread over four different weeks depending on different geographical regions. Unfortunately Stockholm happened to have its spring holiday just when there was an enormous spread of Covid-19 in Europe … so a lot of Swedes living in the Stockholm area came back with the disease. And that started an epidemic on a level that was much higher than the start of the epidemic in the South of Sweden, or in Finland or in Norway. Currently that’s to me the most likely theory – that if you have a massive introduction, it’s going to be a disease that is very, very hard to control.” Stockholm, in other words, was more like London or New York than Oslo or Helsinki in terms of introduction of the virus.

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He believes strongly that eradication — the zero-tolerance approach that is increasingly winning the day in the UK and US — is not a viable option.

“I don’t think that this is a disease that we can eradicate – not with the methods that we have right now. It might be a disease that in the long term we can eradicate with a vaccine, but I’m not even sure about that. If you look at comparable diseases like the flu and other respiratory viruses we are not even close to eradicating them despite the fact that we have a vaccine. I personally believe that this is a disease we are going to have to learn to live with.”

Many people feel that Anders Tegnell’s approach has been overly laissez-faire and that even now, he should be introducing more draconian measures. A model this week from his Health Agency suggested as many as 3000 additional deaths may be seen in Sweden in the next year — shouldn’t he do more to stop that happening?

He insists that those projections are only models, and that he hopes and expects to achieve a much better result. But he is also mindful of whether these draconian measures may do more harm than good:

“Of course we are trying to keep the mortality rates as low as possible, but at the same time we have to look at the draconian measures you are talking about. Are they going to produce even more deaths by other means than the disease itself? Somehow we need to have the discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve. Is it better for public health as a whole? Or is it trying to suppress Covid-19 as much as possible? Because getting rid of it I don’t think is going to happen: it happened for a short time in New Zealand and maybe Iceland and those kind of countries might be able to keep it away, but with the global world we have today, keeping a disease like this away has never been possible in the past and it would be even more surprising if it were possible in the future.”

One type of intervention that does not appear to have adverse effects is encouraging, or mandating, the use of masks. This has become an intensely political issue in the US and more recently in the UK. In Sweden mask use is minimal in almost all settings. Why is he not even recommending use of masks?

“One reason is that the evidence base for using masks in society is still very weak. Even if more and more countries are now enforcing them in different ways … we haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising. The other reason is that everything tells us that keeping social distance is a much better way of controlling this disease than putting masks on people. We are worried (and we get at least tales from other countries) that people put on masks and then they believe they can go around in society being close to each other, even going around in society being sick. And that, in our view, would definitely produce higher spread than we have right now.”

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The emphasis on spread of the virus to the exclusion of everything else Dr Tegnell believes is misguided, as the number of cases is less and less correlated to the number of deaths.

“Deaths are not so closely connected to the amount of cases you have in a country. There are so many other things that influence the amount of deaths you have. What part of the population gets hit? Is it the elderly people? How well can you protect people in your long-term facilities? How well does your healthcare system continue to function? How can we improve the treatment in ICUs? All of these things have been changing a lot in the past few months… Those things will influence mortality a lot more, I think, than the actual spread of the disease.”

His belief is that, in the final account, the Infection Fatality Rate will be similar to the flu: “somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of people getting infected, maybe … And that is not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu.”

On the controversial question of immunity, he suggests that a larger percentage of the population in Sweden is already immune than antibody studies suggest.

“There are a number of small studies already that show that of people who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 with PCR, not all of them develop antibodies. On the other hand we have quite a lot of evidence that falling ill with Covid-19 twice seems to be extremely rare… Obviously there is also quite a big part of the population that has other kinds of immunity and T Cell immunity is the one that is most likely.

“What we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else has changed. That means that immunity affects the R value quite a lot in Sweden today.”

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Does that mean that Sweden will be better placed to limit second waves and future flare ups than countries that have had minimal infection levels so far?

“I think it’s likely that those kinds of outbreaks will be easier to limit in Sweden because there is immunity in the population. All our experience with measles and other diseases shows that … we know that with large immunity in the population it is much easier to control the outbreaks than if you don’t have immunity in the population.

“There is now a number of countries in Europe that have a fairly low level of spread for a very long time, which is very unusual with a disease that seems to be so contagious, and where there is so little immunity in the population. If that is really a sustainable way for the disease to exist we will wait and see — I think the fall will show if it is possible or not.”

The eyes of the world have been on him for the past few months. How would he like to be judged, and when?

“It is better to have a more complete discussion around this in say 12 months, after next summer, then I think we can more fairly judge what has been good in some countries and bad in other countries.”

He has promised to talk to us again at that time. 23^rd July 2021 – it’s in the diary.

The new, ongoing serology study by the ONS and Oxford University — the first phase of which is released tomorrow — will settle the argument even more definitively. It is expected to show that under 10% of the UK population have had Covid-19: still a lot of people, but not enough to be confident about much of an immunity effect. Hopes of widespread symptomless infections and 50% infection rates will be dashed. Ongoing suppression is the plan — Ferguson 1, Giesecke 0.

Meanwhile all the political pressure on the Prime Minister is pushing him towards a slower and more cautious path towards lifting the lockdown. Even the superlatively tentative first steps he took on Sunday, wading through ifs and buts, were leapt on by the SNP and trade unions as proof of a reckless Tory Party pushing workers into the workplace before it was safe.

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As for the voters, polls show that the British public has fully signed up to lockdown life. A survey released at the weekend showed that 73% of Brits think protecting lives should take precedence over the economy, compared to just 49% of Germans and 44% of Swedes. Polling since Sunday‘s announcement suggests that voters are split almost exactly evenly on whether or not even those tiny relaxations were too much, too soon. On that evidence, it looks like the Prime Minister went about as far as he could go.

And yet, despite all this, in time we may find ourselves tacking back to something closer to the Swedish model anyway. Here’s how.

First, public opinion will change, and despite their current popularity, attitudes to the restrictions will eventually sour. While 82% of voters say they could put up with lockdown-style measures until the beginning of June, that drops to 69% for the beginning of July and 44% for the beginning of August. Data from YouGov shows that support for individual lockdown measures has already been drifting down from its peak at the end of March.

Second, the ‘test, track and trace’ strategy could quickly start to feel like fighting an impossible battle. News from abroad has not been encouraging: in recent days, Germany’s R rate has shot up back above 1 after just four days of relaxing measures, and South Korea has had to close its bars and nightclubs after a single man infected over 75 people in one night. You would have to be very optimistic to feel that the UK, with its much larger infection and somewhat patchy record of government technology schemes, is going to find it easier than these countries.

Fighting a losing battle can quickly slide from feeling dispiriting into feeling absurd. The British have a finely developed instinct for nonsense regulation — the contradictions within those announced yesterday are already being openly mocked. The newly-issued guidelines for early-years schools that are supposed to reopen on June 1^st state that teachers should “reduce contact between children and staff as far as possible” and children should ideally be kept in “small groups 2m away from each other”. Good luck making that happen in a hall full of five-year-olds who’ve been cooped up at home for two and a half months. A policy that is impossible to fulfil will be seen as a bad policy.

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Boris’s off-the-cuff invocation of “good solid British common sense” as a guiding principle hints at the direction of travel. It’s just a question of whether official regulation catches up with what people are already moving to — doing what seems possible or reasonable in each situation. Allowing individual citizens to use common sense when interpreting advice is the basis of the Swedish approach.

In making that determination, people inevitably take into account their own level of risk. So, just as the Government advised the over-70s to take ‘extra caution’ in their observance of the lockdown rules, people who consider themselves or their loved ones particularly vulnerable will continue to be more cautious. Whether or not it is Government-endorsed, we may practically end up with something close to the sort of ‘lanes’ system that Neil Ferguson told me was impossible — the most vulnerable and their carers in the ultra-cautious lane, the rest of us in the ‘doing our best’ lane, and people who already have proven antibodies living life in the fast lane. If you are allowed to quarantine in and out of the country, then there is no reason why you can’t quarantine between lanes: adult siblings could take it in two month shifts to be in the ‘safe lane’ to be able to spend time with elderly parents, for example. People will devise their own regimes.

Perhaps the most important difference between the UK and Sweden regards the level of infection (and by extension deaths) we are theoretically prepared to tolerate going forward. The Swedes openly expect the virus to gradually pass through the population until “collective immunity” is achieved (note the new Left-friendly monicker); the Brits are nominally committed to suppressing it indefinitely. But to what level? Nobody in the British Government has has talked about complete eradication.

The official new ‘Covid alert level’ guidelines are revealing on this question. Level 3 of 5, which means ‘a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation’ is to be met with a policy of ‘gradual relaxation of restrictions and social distancing measures’; only if transmission is ‘high or rising exponentially’ will we start ramping restrictions back up. In order to technically qualify as an ‘epidemic’ you should have 40 active cases per 10,000, which according to the latest ONS data we are beneath already, so this suggests that quite a substantial infection level could be tolerated.

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Despite the R number going above 1 in Germany this week, and therefore Covid becoming a growing infection, the country has so far not reimposed restrictions. With its vaguely defined threat levels and singular focus on the R number (which is famously hard to calculate and can be misleading) the British Government has allowed itself the same flexibility to adjust the level of infection it is prepared to tolerate based in part on how sustainable (or unpopular) the ongoing restrictions become. Endless on-off changes to the restrictions, with the attendant anxiety and inability to plan forward that would entail, would only chip away at support for the policy, and in the end, the Government. As life starts to get going again and economic green shoots start appearing, the bias will shift towards allowing progress to continue instead of choking it off. And as long as new infections are happening, we will be progressing, however gradually, towards herd — sorry, collective — immunity.

The Swedes have shocked the world with their fatalistic approach to Covid-19. In theory, the Brits have resoundingly rejected it and opted for the opposite approach of active and indefinite suppression. But the bounds of the possible aren’t ultimately decided by politicians, rather by ordinary people: as voter support for the policy, the Government, the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson himself all begin to slide downwards in coming months, we may end up closer to the Swedish approach than anyone now wants to admit. Johan Giesecke may yet have the last laugh.

Then, this weekend, it was the turn of Professor Neil Ferguson to answer the Swede’s critique that his overly pessimistic forecasts had tilted the Government into Chinese-style dirigisme. He cut a very different figure — more cautious, more media-trained, lacking the charismatic heft of the Professor Emeritus but making up for it with precise deployment of the facts and figures. Much as he’d love to be proved wrong, he said, the UK fatality rate of Covid-19 is likely to be 0.8-0.9%, which means that even letting out only the young and healthy will lead to more than 100,000 deaths later this year. We need to prepare for a long fight, a new socially-distanced normal, potentially for years to come.

In theory, theirs is a purely scientific disagreement that boils down to Infection Fatality Ratios, seroprevalence assays, and R0 numbers — and one or other of them will eventually be proved right. But somehow I suspect there will always be enough controversy around how deaths are counted and the economic and health impacts of lockdown to defer that judgement indefinitely. It’s also quite possible that one of them could end up being right in spirit while wrong on the numbers.

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Alongside all the metrics, and the vital assessments of the human cost of different policies, where you stand on this wretched virus also comes down to attitude — your world view. Are you more Giesecke or Ferguson? The expert that most resonates is unlikely to be entirely down to your assessment of the science — more likely a complex combination of your politics, your own life experience, your attitude to risk and mortality and your relationship to authority. Perhaps each of us have elements of both instinct within us — but what do they really represent?

What they are not, despite the attempts of some social media voices to make it so, are good and evil. Clearly, both experts are highly accomplished scientists doing their best to understand a complex threat. Likewise, the wider debate around lockdown is not a contest between rational, good people who value life on the one hand and the cavalier and cynical who care only about economics or themselves on the other. If the do-gooder class try to push that narrative, they will simply lose the argument.

There is not even an in-principle disagreement about the sacredness of every human life, despite attempts to slur those in favour of a speedier timetable out of lockdown as “pro-death”. The principle that some level of increase in infection, and therefore more deaths, is tolerable for the wider good is not often said publicly but is already accepted on both sides of the argument. Denmark, the poster-nation for early and stringent lockdown, has now brought back junior schools alongside published modelling that showed what level of increased infection (and therefore deaths) they expected it to lead to. Nobody raised an eyebrow, because the education of children is so obviously a moral good. It’s really a question of where you fall on a spectrum: how much death would you tolerate, for which wider goods?

In UK policy terms, the ‘landing zone’ now lies in the space between these two experts. At the Giesecke end, we would define success simply in terms of ensuring the NHS is not overwhelmed — this means slowing the spread and protecting vulnerable people as much as practically possible but moving to lift lockdown measures and only reintroducing them if the health service is challenged. At the Ferguson end, we would attempt to keep the outbreak at such low levels that we can wage a long-term ‘test, track and trace’ suppression of the virus, with elements of social distancing to minimise transmission until a vaccine is found.

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The appeal of the first of these options is that it has a clear rationale and an end-point when the virus has passed and life can return to normal. But it suffers from seeming callous and is highly dependent on the quantum of deaths. If we have 100,000 additional Covid deaths within the year, as Professor Ferguson warned, but could get fully back to normal after that, would that be acceptable? At two people in every thousand, most people would then know somebody who died. What about only 20,000 more? Or 200,000?

The Ferguson end of things will likely be more attractive to politicians as, while sidestepping this difficult question, it carries with it a clearer sense of virtue and action. As Gov Cuomo of New York is now fond of saying, “we’re not going to accept the premise that human life is disposable.” There is a strong appeal to society pulling together to protect our most vulnerable, and we know from polls that the public continues to support the more cautious approach.

But it is dangerous because it has no clear measure of success, and no way out: if the goal is just to “keep transmission low”, how low is low enough? Any move away from total lockdown potentially takes you further from your goal, and back towards a relentless fear of cases starting to creep up once again.

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Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown

By James Kirkup

In the ‘Giesecke’ worldview, this would amount not to a victory but to a surrender. The world becomes a place of indefinite anxiety, with the constant threat of curtailment hovering over all that is best and most human in life — family get-togethers, religious worship, children playing, plans for the future, creative projects – it risks becoming a conscribed, smaller, more fearful world. At its most extreme, a long-term ‘suppression state’ really could start to feel like oppressive regimes of history, from the Puritans to the Communists, that misguidedly tried to remake the whole natural order in pursuit of a single definition of virtue. People who recoil from any move in this direction can hardly be dismissed, or called immoral.

Somewhere in between these two opposing instincts lies a wise way forward; a path has to be found between not just different assessments of the facts but different world views.

In between his careful words, I detected something of the idealist about Neil Ferguson — the younger of the two scientists was keen to break new ground and win a battle. “We’re in a horrible place, aren’t we,” I said, expecting him to agree, but he immediately countered that, on the contrary, the world has achieved what he never thought he would see in this century, and has collectively stopped a highly infectious respiratory virus in its tracks. The South Korean model offers hope for an unprecedented new technology-driven response to an epidemic. For an expert who has spent years looking at fatality rates and modelling outcomes this must feel like huge progress: the entire world united against a disease.

Meanwhile, somewhat ironically given the laser-targeted threat of this disease on the old and vulnerable, the Giesecke approach felt imbued with the more philosophical perspective of later life. He has seen many pandemics; we live in a world full of various threats and dangers, and we can’t stop everything to try to run from one new one. Young people must be allowed to do what young people do, and older people, without the luxury of unlimited years ahead of them, must be allowed to choose to go back to seeing their grandchildren and living a full life even knowing the risks.

Whether you’re more Giesecke or Ferguson, it’s time to stop pretending that our response to this threat is simply a scientific question, or even an easy moral choice between right and wrong. It’s a question of what sort of world we want to live in, and at what cost.

Politically, the Swedes have long served as pin-ups for both the Left and Right. Bernie Sanders makes constant reference to Sweden as a model for his brand of ‘democratic socialism’, while David Cameron used to regularly seek inspiration from his Swedish counterparts on ideas as diverse as free schools, the Big Society and doing away with inheritance tax. More recently, the Right has invoked Swedish concerns about mass immigration as proof that it’s not only baddies who worry about that issue. Whatever your politics, if the Swedes are doing it, it must be OK.

Suddenly, in its response to the Coronavirus, the behaviour of my mother country is not meeting with the usual chorus of approval. By taking a radically different approach, have the Swedes finally lost their famed good sense… or should the rest of the world once again be looking to their example?

The coronavirus epidemic in Sweden — with 10 million population — is already relatively advanced: 3,500 certified infected and over 100 dead. But the Government refuses to ‘lock down’ the country as a response to the virus. They are following something closer to the ‘mitigation’ strategy that Boris Johnson’s government initially seemed to favour, before the sudden pivot to ‘suppression’.

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Today, Sweden stands alone in Europe. Schools remain open (except for over 16s and universities, which are judged to function well remotely and don’t take key workers out of circulation) restaurants and bars are open (although only for table service to avoid throngs gathering at the bar). Gatherings of up to 50 people are still allowed, and there is much discussion over whether families all over Sweden should travel North for their annual Easter skiing trips at resorts in the mountains — all open for business as usual.

In theory, the difference in approach is a technical one: the Swedish scientists simply take a different view. The Swedish strategy is being led by ‘State Epidemiologist’ Anders Tegnell, who rather like Messrs Whitty and Vallance in the UK, has become something of a national leader and is on the television every day. The public health authority which he represents has released detailed modelling on a region-by-region basis that comes to much less pessimistic conclusions in terms of hospitalisations and deaths per thousand infections than the infamous study by Imperial College, about which Tegnell is vocally sceptical. “It’s not a peer-reviewed paper,” he has said. “It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

Sweden’s number of hospital beds per thousand is the lowest in Europe (the UK is the second lowest), but despite this, Tegnell has identified a number of factors that he thinks make Sweden well placed for the coming epidemic. The number of multi-generational households is very low, compared to say Italy, slowing transmission to the more vulnerable older generation; there is a large geographical spread of the population; and there is an observable tendency for Swedish people to follow advice, rather than need legal imperatives to do so. Families have been advised to avoid visiting older relatives where possible and urged to work from home if they can. It’s roughly Boris Johnson, circa three weeks ago.

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Tegnell doesn’t like to describe his strategy as ‘herd immunity’ but he talks openly about the inevitability of the disease passing through a large chunk of the population, and even says that containing the disease like South Korea is doing would not even be desirable, since it will surely only come back. His stated goal is to slow the spread of the infection to a manageable pace, and he doesn’t believe a mandated lockdown is necessary to achieve that.

So far, so technical. But look more closely and the difference between the UK and Swedish approaches is as much about politics as science.

I spent much of the weekend on the telephone to friends, family and journalists from both Left and Right in Sweden and it felt like I’d fallen through the looking glass into an upside-down world. It almost could be the UK, just with a few political factors flipped over.

First, the fact that they are standing apart is a point of pride as much as concern. There is a note of Swedish exceptionalism, particularly when contrasted with longstanding competitors Denmark and Norway (both of whom have opted for a very thorough lockdown). I heard multiple theories as to why their Scandinavian neighbours were different, ranging from Denmark and Norway’s occupation during the Second World War having given them have a residual mistrust of authority, to the Danish government’s political desire to look strong. It couldn’t be further from the UK instinct, which is to take any differences with other countries as proof of our own sluggishness and inadequacy.

Second, the Government is a centre-Left coalition, which changes everything. Alongside a deep-seated Swedish respect for technical experts, this means that support for the more moderate strategy is considered the enlightened left-liberal position; unlike the UK or the US, the knowledge class are fully on-side. Anders Tegnell himself has a left-of-centre feel about him, making regular reference to the importance of equality in the government’s chosen course. This means, although he continues to meet with criticism, there are no online hoards of political activists demanding a lockdown.

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The political critics, such as they are, are more likely to come from the Right, such as populist anti-immigration MP Hanif Bali (an occasional guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News programme), controversial Dagens Nyheter editor-in-chief Peter Wolodarski and Quillette’s Paulina Neuding. But they are few and far between: even the populist Swedish Democrats have largely kept quiet. One 30-year-old Stockholmer I spoke to said that the only advocates of a lockdown she had noticed in her social media feeds were “a few far-Right guys and the climate deniers”.

It’s the opposite of the political landscape in the UK, where deep mistrust from the long Brexit battle meant that whatever the Cummings-Johnson government initially proposed was instinctively suspected as bad and wrong by its political opponents; so the virtuous Left-liberal position quickly came to be calling for a more draconian shutdown. Rival experts were found, a campaign developed, and the Government ultimately changed course against a background of huge political pressure.

It is possible — perhaps likely — that as the death toll increases in Sweden in coming weeks they will also fall into line and impose a stricter lockdown. But if they don’t, the experience of that country will offer a vital way of knowing whether or not the unprecedented cancellation of life, population-wide house arrest and destruction of the economy that the UK and so many other world powers have chosen will have been the correct response to this threat.

If, at the end of this grisly period, the deaths per capita in Sweden are much higher than neighbouring Denmark and Norway, the more draconian approach will seem to have been worth it; but if the Swedish experience remains roughly in line with those countries, justifying the enforced lockdown will be much harder, and questions with profound consequences will rightly be asked about the decisions of the UK and the wider world.

After all, Jeremy Corbyn had only been in the job a few months and some officials noted — not unkindly — the toll the job was taking on him. Two general elections in barely six months had been followed by the immense task of governing Britain in its first year outside the European Union.

On top of that, he, nominally at least, was overseeing John McDonnell’s “economic revolution”. That agenda had already seen the Corbyn government facing staunch opposition in the Commons, the Lords and in the courts, as aggrieved investors claimed the British government had violated international trade agreements and even human rights law by confiscating shares.

No wonder the man was tired: let him sleep. No point waking him about some rock in the Baltic Sea with a population of 20,000 Swedes. No, the duty clerk thought, I’ll just tell the Chief of Staff. He might be a ferocious manager of Government advisers — he’d just summarily sacked another of Home Secretary Angela Rayner’s spads for alleged disloyalty  — but he’s always very keen to hear news about Russia.

Curiously, when the clerk called the Chief of Staff just after 2am, the phone was answered on the first ring and he sounded wide awake. Nor did he sound surprised to hear that initial assessments suggested that the “fishing boats” were carrying several thousand armed Russian men who, though they were not in uniform, moved and spoke like a professional military unit.

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“Interesting,” the Chief of Staff drawled in response to the clerk, public school vowels to the fore, “but not urgent, surely? Sweden’s not even in Nato, after all. Not sure this is one we want to jump into.”

Surprisingly, that was not the view in Washington. Everyone knew that President Trump’s father, Fred, was not, as he had long claimed, from Sweden, but that didn’t stop the President from invoking his supposed Swedish blood in a televised address to the nation warning Vladimir Putin to “get those men off my father’s soil”. (The Washington commentariat were divided in their explanations for this new approach to Russia: some said it just was part of the 2020 election strategy; some said it related to the potential seizure of a Trump International hotel in St Petersburg; CNN ran another analysis piece suggesting the President was now in the advanced stages of dementia.)

Almost equally surprising, was President Macron’s similarly bellicose response. Keen not to let Trump set the pace, Macron made his own address, promising that France would honour its role as the ultimate guarantor of European security: “Aujourd’hui et pour toujours, la France protégera l’Europe.” Pledging to stand in solidarity with a fellow EU member, he even reminded the French and the world that France retained full nuclear strike capability.

In London, a rather different story. Prime Minister Corbyn of course addressed the Commons, but insisted that there was no clear evidence of Russian state involvement in “the events” in the Baltic. Britain would wait for the accounts of the Swedish and Russian governments before drawing conclusions, he told MPs, but talk of a military response was “baseless and irresponsible”. Calm diplomacy was the only way forward, he told a restive House.

He even drew some grim laughs as he ridiculed demands from Conservative Leader, Dominic Raab, for a more muscular response in defence of Sweden: “May I remind him, Mr Speaker, that he was foreign secretary in the government that tore Britain out of the European Union without an agreement and so severed our most important relationship with the Swedish people he now claims to care about?”

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From that day in early April 2020, things moved quickly. The Russian fishermen established a large, secure compound with fortifications, secure communications links and what satellite images suggested were several batteries of anti-aircraft missiles. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the fishermen were simply patriotic Russian citizens who had taken it upon themselves to protect Russia’s interests in the Baltic. In Moscow, state-run news channels ran packages about the Russian occupation of Gotland in 1808, quoting historians who said the island had always been Russian but was unlawfully seized by the Swedes.

Meanwhile, Macron pulled a further surprise by demanding that the response to the “Russian invasion of Sweden” be coordinated through Nato, not the EU military planning cell.

This, the cynics said, was an acceptance that the EU, shorn of British military involvement, lacked the clout needed to face down the Russians. Taking the Nato route was Macron’s way of testing American committment to the Alliance, and pressuring the Corbyn Government to support him.

The Corbyn Government did no such thing. Despite — or perhaps because of — the outrage of Conservatives and British diplomats and generals, the Prime Minister continued to insist on an approach he called “security through peace”. Britain would not take sides, No 10 said, because that would only escalate the situation. “Just as Jeremy worked for peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, he will work for peace here too,” the Chief of Staff told journalists.

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As part of the new government’s new way of doing politics, the Baltic crisis would be put to the new “citizens’ assemblies”, consultative panels that were supposed to inject fresh legitimacy into politics. “Jeremy is bringing the voice of the people to the heart of government,” in the words of a Guardian columnist.

When the Prime Minister addressed the Commons, in July, to report on the verdict of the citizens and the Government’s response, his statement set new standards for shock and surprise.

Not only did “the people” want no part in any dispute with Russia over Gotland, they wanted no part in any Nato response, Corbyn declared. Accordingly, the Government of the United Kingdom was invoking Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Britain would leave Nato.

The ensuing rage in the Commons forced Speaker Bercow to suspend the sitting for 15 minutes, and threaten to expel several Conservative members from the chamber. Even Emily Thornberry, shouting from the Labour backbenches, was severely reprimanded.

When the Prime Minister was able to resume his statement, he had more. Once that exit from Nato was completed, Corbyn continued, Britain would begin the process of retiring the Trident nuclear deterrent; the replacements for the Vanguard-class nuclear subs would be cancelled. “As a neutral nation committed to security through peace, Britain has no need of weapons that could kill millions,” he said, promising to spend the Trident budget on the NHS instead. Additional health spending would be focused on areas that had reported shortages of medical supplies and NHS staff following Britain’s EU exit, he added: “We will use this peace dividend to heal the wounds caused by the reckless Tory Brexit.”

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He ended his statement by setting out how these proposals had come directly from those citizens’ assemblies. “Up and down the country, thousands of British women and men and people of other gender identities have told us clearly that Britain’s future, the future of their children, will be secured not by rushing into the imperialist wars of past centuries, but by taking the path of peace and healing,” he told MPs. “This is the will of the people and we will implement it.”

In a briefing following the statement, the Chief of Staff waited patiently for journalists to stop shouting before explaining that, even as he spoke, UK ambassadors were serving notice to Nato members that Article 13 would apply and UK membership would cease on 31st October 2020. In the meantime, he explained, UK officers and officials had been ordered to withdraw from Nato structures and operations immediately. “We are leaving, so there is no point in them being there any longer,” he said.

Would Parliament get a say on the withdrawal, he was asked? No. The Prime Minister would be exercising prerogative power. “He is well within his rights to do so,” the Chief of Staff said. “There is ample precedent for a Prime Minister acting this way in service of the people.”

The legal challenge to that decision began the very next day. Raab himself said he wanted to be party to the action and was even prepared to appear in court, but quickly abandoned that plan when it became clear that the case would rest on the precedent set in R. (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, otherwise known as the Gina Miller case.

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Despite contesting the case, the Government lost — and lost quickly. By late August, the Supreme Court had ruled that Parliament must have the final say on Article 13 and Nato exit. While Britain’s politicians fixated on court hearings in London, the rest of the world watched a rock in the Baltic.

The day after the Supreme Court ruling, Vladimir Putin made a televised statement: Russian citizens would be “rescued” from Gotland by the Russian Navy under a process witnessed by “monitors from neutral countries, including Great Britain”. The Russian president was effusive in his praise for Jeremy Corbyn, “a man of peace who is delivering security for his people and the world.”

Asked if the Prime Minister had spoken to the Russian President before that address, Downing Street declined to answer. Nor did No 10 respond to questions about a Reuters report from Moscow suggesting that the Chief of Staff had held two days of meetings with Putin in a Black Sea resort the previous week. A Moscow-based blog linked to the few remaining liberal opponents to Putin also suggested that the President had decorated the Chief of Staff with a medal, possibly the Medal for Impeccable Service XX, and legal title to a seaside dacha.

Within hours of that report hitting the wires, several prominent supporters of the Corbyn Government began to argue on Twitter that the Chief of Staff was not just a genius who had out-thought his domestic opponents, he was also a major international figure who deserved credit for defusing the Baltic crisis. Attempts to smear him as a Russian agent of influence, it was suggested, were just another “Black Ops” move to undermine the elected government by the British deep state.

When the Commons returned in early September, Prime Minister Corbyn showed no signs of changing his plans over the Alliance. He explained to MPs that, having served notice to quit, the process of UK departure from Nato could not now be stopped. His case was supported by both Trump and Macron, who both, in their own ways, made plain that Britain had made its choice and chosen a side.

Asked repeatedly by MPs to say that the Government would comply with the Court ruling and introduce legislation for the Article 13 exit, Corbyn declined to give a clear answer, instead pointing at the Conservative front bench and naming, in turn, every member who had sat in the Government of Boris Johnson. “How dare they, Mr Speaker, how dare they seek to block the will of the people, the people’s demand for security through peace?” he asked.

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No one was surprised by what came next in the Commons. Raab quickly formed an ad hoc alliance with around 20 Labour MPs (they quickly became known as the Atlee Group, though some preferred “Bevin’s Boys”) who moved to take control of the Order Paper and introduce legislation that would require the Government to pause the Article 13 notice and get Parliamentary consent to reinstating it.

Nor was the Chief of Staff’s first response a surprise: all Labour MPs supporting the motion would lose the Labour Whip and the party’s general secretary would not endorse their reselection as Labour candidates in future elections.  “These MPs are siding with the Conservatives to try to drag Britain into war and danger,” the Chief of Staff told reporters. “The people have clearly said they want security through peace, but these MPs have made themselves the enemies of peace.”

The motion passed nonetheless. In early September 2020, lacking a Commons majority, facing a Supreme Court ruling and the prospect of parliamentary defeat, it was now widely expected that even the Corbyn Government would have to back down.

That was what journalists summoned to an on-camera Downing Street statement by both the Prime Minister and Chancellor McDonnell expected. McDonnell’s presence promoted widespread Twitter speculation that Corbyn would actually announce he was stepping down, perhaps for reasons of health, and hand over to his ally.

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In fact, the Prime Minister announced that he was immediately asking the Queen to prorogue Parliament. The new session would begin on 1st November, with a Queen’s Speech setting out Chancellor McDonnell’s New Green Deal. There would also be a bill setting a legal cap on military spending at 1% of GDP and giving details of the new hospitals and nurses that would be hired “in every constituency” using the “peace dividend” produced by scrapping the “Trident weapon of mass murder”.

“The will of the people is clear,” the Prime Minister declared. “They want security through peace and they want medicine not murder. That is what this Government will give them, by any means necessary.