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Swedish pluralism means Nigel might get some friends in Brussels and the Greens soar higher than ever

May 27

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Elections, Environment | 1 Comment

How the European elections play out in different countries is highly dependent on which system of election the member state uses. The British regional list system (including Wales and Scotland, but not Northern Ireland) still guarantees a significant advantage to larger parties with a very high threshold for gaining a regional seat (upwards of ten per cent), meaning parties can gain nine or ten per cent across the country yet still fail to achieve a single MEP.

                             In Sweden, however, there is a single national list, and the Swedes have thrown up a very diverse range of parties to send to Brussels. There are two bits of good news from Sweden in a Europe otherwise mired in a far-right resurgence and a directionless but emboldened populist movement. The first is that the Swedish feminist group Feminist Initiative cleared the four per cent hurdle and made history in the process. Should they repeat the feat in September they will enter Sweden’s national legislature with twenty members forming the first feminist parliamentary party in European history.

                             An even bigger piece of positive news is that the Swedish Green Party overtook the Cameron-inspiring Moderate party for the first time, making them the second biggest party on almost sixteen per cent. The Moderates are now doing a lot of soul searching, polling one of their worst results in any election since the 1970s. The division of parliamentary mandates means that larger parties do not win as many seats as smaller parties do per percentage point, so the victory is mostly symbolic for the Greens, but like Feminist Initiative they go into September’s national elections with a good chance of becoming a fairly equal partner in a governing coalition. The secret of their success was becoming the biggest party in all three of Sweden’s large cities and harnessing the youth vote.

                             The national list system also meant that the far-right (though increasingly respectable) Swedish Democrats (SD) secured two seats. Their friends in the far-right Danish People’s Party are keen on cooperation with the British Tory-led group in the European Parliament, but this leaves the Swedish Democrats without too many friends.  The talk in the Swedish media is that SD fancy their chances with Britain’s favourite non-racist party. If this comes off it will mean UKIP sharing photocopying budgets with a party who went into the election promising to combat extreme feminism among other evils. Previous japes involving SD include one of their MPs attacking someone with a metal pole after a night out and some choice words about Roma that would make Nigel Farage turn away in shame.

                             What the Swedish elections to Brussels show best is what a pluralist media and election system looks like. With nine different parties represented from radical left to extreme right, via pink, Green and blue, it is representative in a way Britain’s system is not. With a similar system Greens in the UK would probably have around six MEPs, UKIP nineteen (not twenty-four) and one or two fewer for Labour and the Tories. This does not of course take into account Britain’s complex regional politics (The SNP and Plaid would vanish on a single national list), and the only way to solve that one would be to increase the seats allocated to Wales and Scotland and keep them separate. With its four UKIP MEPs and ten seats, the South of England could surely lose a few anyway.  And if the SD’s Björn Söder pops up next to Nigel Farage in Brussels, just remind yourself that UKIP are not a racist party.

Londoners and Leithers, struggling together

May 2

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy | Comments off

Ocean terminal – More shops than ships

Walking around Westfield Statford City, a sweeping arc of restaurant chains and pretend outdoor highstreets with speakers pumping out Rihanna to keep the shoppers moving, you see a sports shop with England’s Wayne Rooney in the window. In front of Wayne (who is just a Wayne-sized poster) is the new England shirt, and around it in a neon crest is the motto ‘Risk Everything.’

I’m not an expert on  life guidance, but ‘risk everything’ strikes me as a particularly bad motivational slogan unless you’re on the Rangers board or are a compulsive gambler. It’s definitely a long way from the ‘work hard and you can achieve your dreams’ rhetoric espoused by Michael Owen in the popular Children’s BBC series Zero to Hero. In the latter, Owen appeared out of a lifesize poster to give the show’s young protagonist pep talks. In Westfield Stratford City Wayne bursts forth, and he seems to be asking me to remortgage my house and put the money on the ‘orses.

The particular piece of London where Westfield have set up shop(s) is a footballing heartland, with West Ham and Leyton Orient within spitting distance of the Waitrose, John Lewis and Body Shop outlets of new Stratford. This is what Glasgow City Council hope the new East End will turn into (just as was the ambition with new Leith and the rather forlorn Ocean Terminal), but you need not go far to find people with little to lose.

Fifteen minutes away on the Docklands Light Railway and you are in Beckton, the end of the line. Step off the train and there is a flat vista of car parks and slip roads ventilated by the stiff breeze of the Thames estuary. Across the street is a huge single-story ASDA, a car park surrounding a pretend shopping street where all the outlets are owned by the supermarket. In the window of the supermarket pharmacy is a display made in the run up to the 2012 Olympics by local school children. Eagerly painted flags hang in stasis over magazine collages of athletes and football stars. Presumably they’re still there because nothing has yet come forth to replace them, as if the anticipation just before the event were the high point. It is that kind of promise that can sustain people, and then comes the long tail.  Perhaps not risking everything, but investing everything in nothing is what the people of East London’s outer rim have done. The yuppie flats are changing the skyline in Stratford, but in Beckton the flags still hang limply, sealed off from the Thames breeze by plate glass.

In Scotland, the flags are all one colour. As the referendum approaches the Saltire has taken on a different significance for many people. The 18 September is the day the events kick off and Scotland undergoes regeneration on a national scale. An awful lot of people are investing their hopes for the future in a few short months. The bigger risk is not that independence won’t be achieved, but that its execution will fail to have the transformative effect its most ardent supporters promise and believe. In 2015, as money floods into Edinburgh from around the world, will the country look much different to the single parent dragging their shopping to the car at the ASDA in Newcraighall in the January wind? Will Leith’s Yes posters and fly-posted socialist battle-cries flap in the breeze as Edinburgh’s West End gears up for cheap credit, Dublin style, or will something good be made to come of it? If you’re asking people to risk everything, you need to make sure every one of those people sees the transformation their support deserves.

This wooden IKEA is how you sell reduction

Mar 20

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Democracy, Europe, Holyrood | Comments off

Being back in Sweden for the first time in a while, I’ve been able to watch Labour’s devolution proposals unfold from afar. What struck me most is that Labour still want the Scottish parliament to have less control over taxation than Swedish regional government does. Having tried to explain it to a journalist friend inquisitive about the referendum she was amazed that they would even attempt such a damp squib (from a Swedish perspective, some of the logical inconsistences of the Holyrood settlement are painfully obvious)

Within a few days of the independence referendum Sweden will go to the polls for its municipal and general elections, with expected gains for the Green and Left parties and perhaps even the first seats in parliament for the Feminist Intitiative party. The strategy of the Social Democrats in Sweden at the moment is to do absolutely nothing and ride the wave of disenchantment with the Cameronite Alliance for Sweden with whom they actually share a great many polices.

The Swedish Social Democrats, once one of the most respected and successful progressive movements in global politics, has become an intellectual void in the same way as the British Labour Party. Unable or unwilling to act decisively, time after time it produces reforms and reports they fail to either honour its past or develop any coherent vision for its future. Anas Sarwar’s doxological addiction to ‘fairness’ would be well at home in contemporary Swedish social democracy, just as it would be in that erstwhile heavyweight the German SPD. Drifts to the right are one thing, but drifts into directionless tokenism and policy by policy compromise and point scoring are almost worse.

The upshot of this could be that come October of this year Sweden will have a progressive government of Greens, Socialists, Feminists and Social Democrats in which the biggest party lacks any purpose whatsoever. It is strangely reminiscent of what one Labour insider said before the last Holyrood election when a Green-Labour coalition briefly appeared to be a possibility: “It’d be great. You’ve got the ideas and we’d get to be back in power.’

Splitting yourself between two similar but also very different political systems is a fantastic way of exploring political alternatives. The question for both Sweden and Scotland come September will be whether their social-democratic heritage can help to positively influence the future or whether they end up rudderless and unambitious in a tokenistic race to tick the right boxes without knowing why.

Fringe benefits of independence

Mar 18

Posted by James in Democracy, Westminster | 5 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-03-18 at 11.04.23The worst reason for voting No to independence is because you don’t like Alex Salmond, and the worst reason for voting Yes is because you don’t like David Cameron. This is a long-term decision about the future governance of Scotland, not a referendum on some here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians on either side of the campaign. However, as the Telegraph reports today (emphasis mine):

The Prime Minister is mindful too of the political peril that comes with defeat. Losing the referendum would be a terminal event for the Conservative and Unionist Party and, as Westminster now acknowledges, would require his immediate resignation. Unsurprisingly, if somewhat depressingly, some Tory MPs have begun factoring in the loss of Scotland as a way of achieving the regime change they yearn for at the top.

Let’s not leave that anti-Cameron glee to the headbangers and Europhobes. Let’s instead accept that the stakes are a little higher even than we thought. Imagine if we could achieve democratic self-governance and simultaneously leave our English/Welsh/Northern Irish friends with a legacy to be thankful for, i.e. ending the political career of the most right-wing Prime Minister in living memory.

This should be a wakeup call to the rUK left. You may not instinctively support independence, perhaps because you’ve got an unduly rosy view of the dinosaurs and timeservers (of all parties) we tend to send to Westminster, or perhaps because you don’t see how it will benefit you. But a Cameron resignation, followed by a vitriolic battle for the future of the Tory party just eight short months before a UK General Election? It’s surely time to book the buses to Scotland from Brighton and Manchester and the Rhondda. Help us to help you.

Seeing an end to Cameron’s misrule shouldn’t swing any votes in Scotland – after all, if he stayed on after a Yes vote he wouldn’t be our problem anyway. But a Yes vote certainly brings some pretty enticing fringe benefits for the left both north and south of the border.

The London model is more like us than we’d maybe wish to think.

Feb 2

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Defence, Democracy | Comments off

Sitting in the foyer of the Citibank building in Canary Wharf, where the trains have no drivers and the supermarkets no checkout staff, Scotland seems a long way away. For many in the independence movement the heart of Britain’s financial industry is the antithesis of everything they want to see in a country.

                             A few miles north, in trendy Hackney (the hipster who attempted a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair and wrote about it in the Guardian walked past me with his girlfriend) the Olympic park and its adjoining shopping centre lie on one side, on the other former warehouses converted into breweries and arts centres. A woman from the Green Party of England and Wales offers me an anti fracking leaflet and the bar is selling bottles of Schiehallion.

                             Down the road in Shoreditch there’s a festival going on of ‘Nordicana’. I don’t go – it’s 25 quid a ticket – but if I had I’d have been able to eat Scandinavian food and ask fawning questions of the stars of Borgen, The Killing and The Bridge.  We would probably have talked about how edgy the shows were and how lovely the cakes in the café are, like watching the Wire with a grab bag of American popcorn and a Budweiser.  

                             If you really want genuine though go a few miles further east still, to Upton Park at the flashpoint between what remains of East London’s white working class mixed with monied and hair-gelled Essex fringe dwellers and the vibrant South-Asian communities that have made Green Street and the area around West Ham’s stadium their own. Inside it might still be 1980 – there isn’t an Asian face to be seen and men wear long coats and caps over impressively engineered haircuts.  In front of me David James does a TV spot. Bobby Moore looks on, England is intact and unchanging. West Ham are one of the best clubs in the country. Men stand smoking in the toilets under the banks of seating, convinced of the superiority of their team like Celtic fans living in 1967. The only Bridge they worry about is the Chelsea one.

                             Then out again, the Olympic park on the horizon. It could almost be the East End of Glasgow, but instead of getting ready for the Commonwealth Games the workmen are trying to erase the Olympics and replace it with ‘regeneration’, expensive flats and transport for commuting south to Canary Wharf and west into the City. In modern Britain this is what prosperity is. Scotland wants London’s immigrants and it wants its wealth. It wants its global profile. In many ways it wants to exist as the British Isles’ other city state. It wants the finance and the business growth, the arts scene and the airport hub. It wants Nordic lifestyle but without too much hard thought given to how or why.  Are these the right things to want? For some, perhaps. If Scotland wants London without the geographical inconvenience of a flight or a train ride, but we should be careful. My company is forthright about the shortcomings. As we stand at the automated checkouts of a Sainsbury’s in Holborn packed with high-heeled young professionals shoving gourmet ready meals into expensive bags, all she wants is to move back to Glasgow, “the most beautiful city in the world.”