In the press those on the left talk of Sweden a model on how a country with a strong social state should be run. In The Guardian, Ruben Andersson, writes the Swedish model is failing.

Whatever Sweden does must be right, or so reason progressive politicians and Guardian journalists – not to mention scores of Swedes. But beyond this blue-eyed vision lurks a darker reality. Sweden’s conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats – the equivalent of the BNP – are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more.

Swedes were roused from this dream with the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme. Palme might have left behind “a country where no one was poor and no one had room for optimism” as Andrew Brown puts it, but it was Sweden’s homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s that finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts hit schools, unemployment rocketed, the Krona sank – leaving the social system in a disarray from which it has not recovered. The conservative government at the time has lately been praised worldwide for its handling of the crisis. Actually the bankers were rewarded, not punished, while the rest of the country is still reeling from the cuts, selloffs and dashed dreams the crisis provoked. But the idea of a well-oiled Swedish model insulated from the shockwaves of capitalism runs on like a Volvo. The reality, like troubled, Ford-owned Volvo itself, is more globalised and gloomy than that. Ruben Andersson, The Guardian.

I’m not quite prepared to be as gloomy as that however, perhaps there’s a clue for a more optimistic outlook in Andersson’s penultimate paragraph.

Just as Sweden was in the vanguard of postwar social democracy, it has since the 1990s become a neoliberal experiment. The experiment has failed, though this fails to register in Sweden itself. No waves rock the stagnant pools of officialdom: strikes are almost unheard of and the tabloids are too busy flogging diet tips to bother. The Swedes cannot let go of their belief in the system. Nor can many on the European left. Ruben Andersson, The Guardian.

Mightn’t neoliberalism be the real fault? Let’s be fair it’s pretty much shagged the rest of us why should Sweden be any different, perhaps a simplistic answer, but let’s not be too hasty – I’m not yet prepared to ditch the Swedish Model, let’s not throw the baby out with the neoliberal bathwater.