London: Hello. I’m lesbian threesome,” the young lady tells Taki. “And I’m Mongolian rampage,” says the young man beside her. We’re at Jeremy Clarke’s book launch in the Spectator’s back garden, to which he invited a dozen readers chosen for submitting the best stories of drunken debauchery. Throughout the evening, guests tried to match the face to the story. Which reader was kneecapped by a pimp in Amsterdam? Who was the academic who got into a drunken fight with a janitor over the affections of the chemistry teacher?
My favourite exchange of the night: “Do you think that’s the chap who was whipped naked with riding crops?” “No, that’s Charles Moore.” To the island of Gotland for Sweden’s annual political festival. Each party has a dedicated day but everyone mixes. I spot the leader of the Christian Democrats; she’s 28 years old. (“It’s the new 45!” explains one of her staffers). Party leaders mix with dog-walkers in the park and anyone can turn up to speeches. Quite a contrast to Britain, where party conferences are sealed off from the public. Things could go wrong — a recent Nordic noir novel imagines Sweden’s entire political class held hostage in Almedalen, the festival site. But the worst that has actually happened was a feminist shaking her naked breasts at the PM. It’s a risk that the Swedes are prepared to run.
The Woodstock mood of this conference has been rather dampened of late by the presence of the Sweden Democrats, a populist anti-immigration party who now have enough seats to qualify for their own day in Almedalen. Everyone else talks about how to crush the party, but not many talk about the issues that trouble its voters. It’s a fairly typical problem in Scandinavia, which is why, for the first time since the war, only one nation — Sweden — has a social democratic party in power.
The problem is fairly obvious to any visitor to Stockholm. The authorities have become so welcoming to immigrants that they are turning a blind eye to misbehaviour, leaving Romanian beggars free to patrol the city’s underground. This has changed the look of several Swedish cities. To make matters worse, the government’s euphem-ism for beggars is “EU migrants”, as if all this was the result of immigration, rather than poor policing. Tragically, Sweden’s opennness is now eating itself, as many voters have come to associate immigration with decay.
One woman tells me that she and others now accompany Jews on their way home from the synagogue in Malmö to protect them from Muslims. My job is to talk about Britain’s ability to integrate immigrants. Newcomers find work fairly easily here, our police keep order fairly well, and our far-right party, the British National Party, was crushed in the election (its support fell 99.7 per cent).
One lesson we’ve imported from Sweden is school reform. It’s going rather well, as I saw last week when I joined the Question Time panel at an Oasis Academy just outside Southampton. The two schools it replaced had just 19 per cent of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). That figure is now 49 per cent, and rising.
Mind you, nothing much embarrasses the Conservatives nowadays. They held a spectacularly glitzy fundraising dinner recently with an austerity-free auction. Lot 1 was a week at a private Jamaican villa for 17 of your closest friends. Lot 3: drinks for 100 at the London Cabaret Club. Lot 5: a day in Tunsmore Park (“You will be given the chance to shoot an array of birds”). Or for the less social, a moat-digger (“ever wanted to own your own JCB?”). Bizarrely, the biggest sum — £200,000 — was paid by a large telecoms company for a yet-to-be-taken photograph of the Cabinet. This kind of thing is fine, I suppose, as long as the press doesn’t find out.
By arrangement with the Spectator
