Politik: När du får oväntat besök!

OPINION | Fraser Nelson, redaktör på The Spectator, var på Gotland under Almedalsveckan. Det var ingen vacker bild han fick av Sverige.

Han rapporterar hur Sverige förändrats markant p.g.a. av den massiva invandringen under senare år. ”This has changed the look and feel of several Swedish cities”, skriver han i tidskriften.

Nelson konstaterar att Sverigedemokraterna har gynnats av detta eftersom inget annat parti vågar ta i frågan.

En annan sak som sticker ut är rasismen som riktas mot judar i Sverige. Och som vanligt är det Malmö som får stå i skamvrån.

Det räcker med andra ord för en utländsk gästa att besöka Sverige under några timmar för att han skall dra någotsånär kloka slutsatser om läget i landet.

Slutsatser som ingen partistrateg, än mindre någon partiledare eller partisekreterare, verkar våga dra i vare sig regeringen, hos deras stödparti eller inom Alliansen.

Är det konstigt att Sverigedemokraterna skördar framgång efter framgång i opinionsundersökningar?

Nelson skriver:

To the island of Gotland for Sweden’s annual political festival — elegantly flat-packed into a few days, rather than the weeks of party conferences to which Brits are subjected. 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 by a ring of steel. 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 Prime Minister. 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. Populists have felled all the others, and felled Sweden’s conservatives last year.

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 and even camp in the shopping streets. This has changed the look and feel of several Swedish cities. To make matters worse, the government’s euphemism for beggars is ‘EU migrants’, as if all this was the natural result of immigration, rather than poor policing. Tragically, Sweden’s openness is now eating itself, as many voters have come to associate immigration with social decay and disorder.

One woman tells me that she and others now accompany Jews on their way home from the synagogue in Malmö to protect them from Muslim gangs. Such stories are enough to make Swedes wonder whether the government has lost control. My job is to talk about Britain’s ability to integrate immigrants — which, I argue, has been a standout success. Newcomers find work fairly easily here, our police keep order fairly well, and our far-right party, the BNP, was crushed at the general election (its support fell 99.7 per cent).