If there is a revolution coming to Sweden you would not want to be on the
wrong side of Josefin. Watched by open-mouthed sparring partners, she
thunders her fists against a punchball as if to say: “Some iron has entered
the Swedish soul.”
And so it has. Sweden, renowned for decades as the model of cosy womb-to-tomb
welfare socialism, has suddenly become a much rawer place.
The centre-right governing coalition of Fredrik Reinfeldt, which came to power
last autumn, is seen by David Cameron as a potential template for Tory
fortunes. Since the election they have seemed determined to roll back the
nanny state after many decades of Social Democratic feather-bedding.
On the agenda is abolition of wealth tax, cuts in income tax and a
privatisation programme that is already starting to excite foreign
investors.
But the most symbolic act so far has been lifting the 37-year ban on
professional boxing, outlawed by the Social Democrats as cruel and morally
dubious. “It was a political move, not a medical one,” says coach Peter
Bermsten, as Josefin rubs herself down. “It took a political decision to
bring us back to reason.”
We are talking in the Fox fight club in Malmö, its walls plastered with
yellowing posters from the days when Sweden was a world-class boxing nation.
One, from 1959, shows Ingemar Johansson set to thump the heavyweight Floyd
Patterson.
Sweden has some catching up to do. “Boxing did not fit into the Social
Democratic self-image of the Swedes in the 1960s,” says Åse Sandell, a
towering flaxen-haired middleweight, who has risen to the top of women’s
boxing only by moving to the United States.
Boxing is booming again and Sandell has become the idol of a new generation.
The smack of leather on leather, the grunt of young boxers who are no longer
confined to heavily regulated amateur bouts: this is the sound and the fury
of a cultural revolution in the making. Not the whiff of cordite, but of
embrocation and sweat.
Sweden’s social welfare model, so admired by Gordon Brown, was ripe for
overhaul. Indeed, so ripe that the Social Democrats grudgingly started their
own reforms, cutting down, for example, on Europe’s most generous sick-leave
arrangements, which were blamed for turning a healthy nation into a society
of work-dodgers.
But they ducked the key question: how much should the state steer the inner
life of the individual? This, after all, is a country that bans all
television advertising aimed at the under-12s, and where the Government
retains a monopoly on alcohol sales to stop people drinking too much.
As we stand with Anders Ljungberg, a local journalist, in Malmö’s immigrant
quarter, we see a group of Kurdish teenagers scuffling playfully at the bus
stop. A Volvo draws up and a white Swede leans out of the window; the kids
quieten down. “He was ticking them off,” Mr Ljungberg says. “He probably
told them that there were better ways of behaving.”
The greatest compliment you can pay a child in Sweden, says Åke Daun, a
sociologist, is to say that he is tyst och fin, quiet and well-behaved. The
Social Democrats came into power in 1932, have ruled for 65 of the past 74
years and ensured that Swedish adults, too, were tyst och fin. They paid the
highest taxes in Europe and in return got the biggest handouts. Parents pay
a maximum of £90 a month for childcare, receive up to 80 per cent of their
salary during their 390-day maternity leave, receive free university
education and access to free retirement homes.
But the sums, even with the current strong economic growth, do not add up.
Swedes are afraid of losing their privileges. But they are even more afraid
that they will slip down the prosperity league. In 1970 they had the
fourth-highest per capita income in the world. Now, as the sociologist Johan
Norberg says: “If Sweden was one of the states of America, it would be the
fifth poorest.”
“We have to make it easier to get work,” says Djordje Jovanovic, 72, a
former waiter who helped to vote the Social Democrats out of power. “I don’t
want us to lose our wealth. When I go to my place on the Costa del Sol I see
really poor Brits pocketing the bread that they get with their soup in cheap
restaurants. We shouldn’t stoop that low, and that means working harder
here, securing our future.”
At H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, we meet Johana Hållin, a 28-year-old
teacher. “We have to make it more profitable to work than to be on social
welfare,” she says with passion, and she really does seem to be the voice of
young Sweden. Certainly she fits into our caricature of a Swede: blonde,
funny, she even teaches the Swedish language.
Yet Sweden is losing its blonde-ness. Some 23 per cent of the population of
Malmö, Sweden’s third city, were born abroad; if their children, born in
Sweden, are taken into account, over 35 per cent have foreign connections.
Somalis, Afghans, Turks, Iraqis and Palestinians are all wedged into the
state-sponsored estates in Malmö’s Rosengard district and almost all live on
welfare.
So here is the most explosive issue in Prime Minister Reinfeldt’s quiet
revolution: if he wants to cut social welfare handouts to force people to
work, what happens to the foreigners who cannot get jobs because they are
foreigners? They get poorer and, since they are being told constantly to
behave more like Swedes, they will start to become more demanding. No more tyst
och fin.
That is why Mr Reinfeldt has taken the unusual step of appointing Nyamko
Sabuni as Integration Minister. She is neither blonde nor blue-eyed: she is
originally from Burundi and is a Muslim. And rarely has a Swedish minister
openly uttered such tough sentiments.
She wants to ban the head-scarf for girls under the age of 15, make visits to
the gynaecologist compulsory for schoolgirls to ensure that they are not
forcibly circumcised, cut state funds for Muslim schools and stopped funding
for a Centre Against Racism. There is one central aim, she says: to get
migrants into jobs. “Language and work are the keys to integration,” says Ms
Sabuni. “The Social Democrats drove people into a dependency culture.” The
Swedish model was based on a homogenous society — not only white, but also
hard Protestant workers shy of public conflict and ever ready to work out
consensus. That was the starting point for Gunnar and Alvar Myrdal, the
spiritual founders of the welfare state in the 1930s. The assumption was
that if it did not work in Sweden, with its population of only nine million,
it would not work anywhere else.
It really does seem to be foundering. Sweden is a society full of hidden
tensions and unemployment, an intrusive state and citizens frustrated by
their lack of choice. It has been defeated not only by the arithmetic (of
how to support an expanding legion of welfare claimants and pensioners on
the basis of a shrinking workforce) but also by sharpening global
competition.
Travel on the 999 bus from Copenhagen to Malmö across the formidable Oeresund
bridge and the accompanying music is of clinking glass — bottles of booze
bought in cheaper Danish shops. State-controlled alcohol sales, in southern
Sweden at least, are sure to buckle.
In the 1970s toy shops were forbidden from selling warlike toys, even water
pistols: now everything is available over the internet and 10-year-olds in
Malmö can admire a plastic replica Nazi Tiger tank in a cheap unregulated
high street store.
The Social Democrats trumpeted the defeat of street prostitution after passing
a law that jails kerb-crawlers rather than women who sell their bodies. But
trade has simply moved from the red light district on Industry Street to the
laptop, with most assignations being made online.
The nanny state is on the retreat. The idea that a just society can be engineered
by an all-seeing bureaucracy has had its day.
The admiration for Sweden from the British Left and Right is thus slightly
puzzling. The interest of the Conservatives — David Cameron and George
Osborne are recent visitors — can be explained by the need to find an
example of how a long-lived Centre-left government can be toppled without
polarising society.
But the real change in Sweden is coming from the people themselves. They want
more freedom of choice and are willing to put with a few punches on the way.
Ask Josefin. But watch out for her left hook.
Going down
— Sweden’s average tax bill (incl local and municipal taxes) is 56 per cent
— In 1970 it was the world’s fourth-richest country (GDP per capita); in 2000
the fourteenth-richest
— Official unemployment rate is 5.7 per cent; Eurostat estimates it at 7.1 per
cent
— Since 1995 the number of self-employed people in the EU has risen 9 per
cent; in Sweden it has fallen by 9 per cent
— State spending has almost doubled from 31 per cent in 1960 to 60 per cent in
1980
— Between 1975 and 2000 per capita income rose in the USA by 72 per cent, in
Western Europe by 64 per cent and in Sweden by 45 per cent
— Average number of patients seen by a Swedish doctor daily has fallen from
nine in 1975 to five in 2006
Source: European Commission; Eurostat, OECD, Swedish Office of National
Statistics
