It is little-known that in 1642, the Scots-born King Charles I — increasingly desperate for resources to prosecute his war against parliament — asked his uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway, for military aid. In return, the Danes wanted the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and to “gain possession of Newcastle in pawn”. It was Northumbria’s lucrative coal trade that appealed. A large shipment of weapons and supplies duly arrived at Holy Island in September 1642, but it is unclear whether Charles ever paid his uncle back. The Danish king certainly didn’t seize the collateral on his loan.

Had he done so, there would have been a precedent. Holy Island was the site of a rather less peaceable Danish excursion in 793, when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne, possibly in retribution for Christian missionary activity in Scandinavia. They were undoubtedly also itching to get their hands on the great wealth of the Northumbrian church. “The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” lamented a Bishop of Lindisfarne, “stripped of all its furnishings, and exposed to the plundering of pagans.” The shock of this event cast a long shadow in the North East, perhaps partly explaining the overemphasis of Scandinavia’s influence on Northumbrian history, and its people.

True, the Viking raids are depicted in William Bell Scott’s great cycle of Northumbrian history murals at Wallington Hall, and Nordic influence can seemingly still be detected in Northumbrian speech. The similarities between the Scandinavian “gå hjem” and Northumbrian “gan yem” — both expressions meaning “go home” — seem obvious. The Dano-Norwegian word for barley, “bygg“, lives on in the name of Newcastle’s famous Bigg Market. These linguistic parallels might suggest Scandinavian roots, but such words are not so much a Viking import as an indication that Northumbria’s is a very conservative English dialect, which shares a common Germanic root with modern Danish. For the Angles that first settled in Britain, after the Romans left, came from Angeln, in the southern part of the Jutland peninsula, where the borders of Germany and Denmark now meet. These Angles established the kingdoms of Deira, centred in what is now Yorkshire, and then Bernicia, in what is now Northumberland and County Durham.

When the Vikings came along a few centuries later, they became infamous for raiding the North East coast. But the Norsemen only tended to settle further south, around the great city of Jorvik and into the Midlands. To this day, members of the Yorkshire Society recite a Declaration of Integrity, which asserts the traditional boundaries of Yorkshire, established by Halfdan Ragnarsson in 875AD. But to the North, the Anglo-Saxons centred on the old kingdom of Bernicia remained unconquered by the invaders (or at least not settled). It is certainly noticeable how all those Scandinavian “-thorpes”, “-thwaites” and “-bys” scattered across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire peter out at the river Tees. Here, the Anglo-Saxon “-worth” is more conspicuous: Backworth, Heworth, Killingworth. Indeed, for a time in the ninth and tenth centuries, the rump of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria between the Tweed and Tees may even have become a centre of resistance against the Vikings.

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The North East will rise again

By Dan Jackson

A teleological version of English history would have it that the mission to unify the patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was inevitable — first under Alfred and then his grandson Æthelstan, with the latter the first to call himself “King of the English”. But this unity did not long survive Æthelstan’s death in 939. For Scandinavian loyalty had remained potent across the “Danelaw” areas of the North, the northern Midlands and East Anglia. In fact, when the Danish King Cnut invaded in 1014, he met so many sympathisers that England was quickly added to his empire. As James Hawes has observed, “the first united ‘England’ was thus created under colonial rule”. And given this disunity, it is not surprising perhaps that William of Normandy “conquered the entire country after a single major battle in 1066, an outcome that would have been much less likely if Anglo-Scandinavian ‘Englalonde’ had in fact been the ancient, united realm of some historians’ fantasies”.

After 1066, overt Scandinavian political influence in England declined rapidly, with only traces left. The word hustings, for instance, derives from the Old Norse “hústhing” — in other words, a “household assembly held by a leader” — from “hús” (house) plus “thing’ (assembly, parliament). In fact, there remain several “Things” across the Nordic world — from the Folketing (“People’s Thing”) in Denmark, to the Storting (“Great Thing”) in Norway, to the Tynwald (“Thing Meadow”) on the Isle of Man — probably the oldest continuous parliamentary body in the world.  

The picture was different in Scotland, where Norwegian overlordship of the western isles persisted until the 13th century. A few hundred years later, in the early modern period, Scottish mercenaries distinguished themselves in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Norwegian partisans actually fought off a Scottish invasion of their homeland in 1612. And even after Scotland unified with England in 1707, the Nordic kingdoms remained serious geopolitical rivals — to the extent that, in 1717, the Swedish Foreign Ministry planned to send an invading force to Scotland in support of the Jacobite cause.

Admittedly, this might have been to counter the Hanoverian George I’s designs on Swedish territory in Northern Germany. Britain as a whole was not sentimental about Scandinavia. In the Napoleonic Wars, Britain ruthlessly attacked Denmark twice to ensure the Danish fleet did not fall into French hands: first in 1801 (“I really do not see the signal,” said Nelson, ignoring his commander’s orders to withdraw from the bombardment of Copenhagen); and again in 1807, when the Danish capital was occupied by British troops, including Sir Arthur Wellesley, who named his famous horse after the battle.

The 19th century saw the Scandinavian kingdoms gradually withdraw from great power politics. The Second Schleswig War of 1864 is usually seen as the first key staging post in German unification, but it was also the twilight of Scandinavian power in Europe. Palmerston’s much-quoted quip about the Schleswig-Holstein Question being so complicated that “only three people ever understood it” was probably just blether to obscure the fact that Britain had (probably wisely) betrayed a solemn promise to maintain Danish territorial integrity, and instead decided to sit out the war between Denmark and its Prussian and Austrian invaders. For proud Danes such as the British Queen Alexandra, the humiliation of 1864 was hard to forgive or forget. She always railed against the protocols that required her son, George V, to dress as a “filthy blue-coat Prussian soldier” whenever he visited the new German Empire.

But with the bloody rivalries of the Dark Ages now ancient history, relations between the British and Scandinavian royal houses grew increasingly cordial. Queen Alexandra’s daughter Maud became the Queen of newly independent Norway after its separation from Sweden in 1905. And harking back to the Viking Kings of East Anglia, Maud’s own son Olav was born in Norfolk — at Sandringham in 1903. Olav’s birth came after a long period of deepening Anglo-Scandinavian trade: the housebuilding boom in British cities relied on Norwegian and Swedish softwoods, and Scandinavian timber was essential to the coal trade, used for pit props and railway sleepers. Danish butter and bacon became staples of the British breakfast table. Many British port towns and cities had great Scandinavian churches, like the spectacular Gustav Adolfs kyrka in Liverpool, home of the Scousers, and the Nordic diaspora gave us Cardiff’s Roald Dahl, Newcastle’s Sir Ove Arup, and hat-trick hero Stan Mortensen from South Shields, the grandson of a Norwegian sailor.

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In 1968, King Olav V himself was invited to open the modernist Civic Centre at Newcastle upon Tyne, home of the Danish merchant navy in the Second World War, when 4,000 Danish sailors relocated from their occupied homeland to live on Tyneside. The building was modelled on the Stockholm Stadhus, as a nod to the Tyne’s modern Hanseatic ties. Although the King was attended by Lutheran ministers in 16th-century ruffs and gowns, the civic centre was seen as an emblem of progressive Nordic modernity. This was part of a process that was recasting Scandinavians as peaceable and stylish, representatives of the very best social democracy. But even the darker history of the Vikings, whose cruelty and sadism was almost unsurpassed, has now been rehabilitated through popular books and TV series like The Last Kingdom, in which uptight and sexually repressed Christians are contrasted unfavourably with the fun-loving Norsemen such as the smoulderingly handsome Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

From one of pillage and rapine, Scandinavia’s reputation has completely turned around in the last 1,000 years — but it’s surely their wealth as much as their cultural achievements that attracts us now. As I have argued, “the one thing that will change attitudes to Britishness in Scotland is for the UK to just be a wealthier and more successful country”. Returning to the restive streets of Orkney, it is perhaps not surprising that a territory that was Norse for longer than it was British now wishes to re-establish its Scandi ties. Yet, there was no Orcadian agitation when Britain was richer and more powerful, with a vast fleet at Scapa Flow. The difference now is that, unlike modern Britain, Norway is happy, successful, and stinking rich.

This stunningly beautiful archipelago off the north-easternmost tip of Scotland is also supposed to be the “happiest place in Britain”. And yet all is not well. On Tuesday, with a show of a dozen or so hands, the islands’ local council gave its support for “alternative forms of governance”, which could reframe its relationship with Westminster in line with crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or overseas territories like the Falklands. It could attempt to go even further, declaring its independence and reviving its historic links with Norway to becoming a self-governing territory, like the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark.

While discussions about going back to their Scandinavian roots are at the exploratory stage — even newspapers haven’t yet settled on whether such a move should be called “Orxit”, “Orkxit” or “Orkexit” — Orcadians seem to be sold on the idea. Reasons for the disgruntlement with Westminster and Holyrood are various, but include under-subsidised ferry fares, a miserly dividend from four decades of North Sea oil exploration and underinvestment by central governments into potentially lucrative wind power projects. As Scotland’s smallest council, it also receives hundreds of pounds less per person than the others.

Certainly, Orkney — and Shetland to its north — is distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. Geographically closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, the islands retain a strong Nordic character, even though they were last under Norwegian and Danish control in 1472. And life on the archipelago certainly has its upsides. It has good schools, affordable houses, clean air and abundance of space, but its winning edge is a form of Scandinavian communitarianism that instils a profound sense of safety and social trust among its 23,000 residents.

Here, crime is rare — the sort of place where farm equipment is shared and a builder’s yard won’t charge you for half a bag of sand. Nearly 40 years ago, my parents bought a property overlooking Scapa Flow which, with a few short intermissions, had been held by our wider family for centuries. On requesting the door key, the estate agent replied that one didn’t exist. (Despite soaring local house prices, which rose 8.5% last year, the average cost of a property on Orkney is just £221,000.)

“Bleak” is a word only our opponents use to describe the place. True, the first view of the high cliffs and red sandstone of Hoy can seem forbidding. Frightening even, particularly if shrouded in sea fret. And the weather in the Northern Isles is changeable, and best described in quantitative terms. The total absence of trees can upset people — but Orcadians reply, I think correctly, that they would only spoil the view.

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It is a quirk of medieval history that the Orkneys — for centuries, a central hinge in a Nordic chain linking Scandinavia with Iceland and Greenland — ever found themselves to be a peripheral province of Scotland. Last month, while raising the prospect of greater autonomy, financial security and economic opportunity for his islands, James Stockan, leader of the Orkney Island Council, noted that “we were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom”. And Stockan believes the islands are being “failed dreadfully”. He recently told BBC Scotland: “The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are.”

Scotland’s acquisition of Orkney in 1472 was accidental. In 1468, the daughter of King Christian I of Norway and Denmark was betrothed to King James III of Scotland. The marriage treaty promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish Florins, but the impoverished Nordic King didn’t have this sum immediately to hand. Consequently, the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland with the intention of being later redeemed once the cash could be found. Alas, this never happened — a tragic turn for Orkney, which found itself a peripheral province of Scotland. Formal sovereignty was never transferred, and historians have long made the case that Scotland holds Orkney and Shetland in pledge rather than by sovereign right. To this day, Orcadians continue to make this point.

Would Orkney fit back into the Norse realm? Well, Orcadians do wear their Viking heritage with great pride. Norn, the local language of Orkney and similar to Icelandic and Faroese, was gradually replaced by Scots, but survived on the outer islands until the late 1700s. The modern Orkney dialect has a noticeable “sing-song” Scandinavian quality, characterised by a rising intonation at the end of a word (known as “the post-stressed syllable”).

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The island also enjoys a strong sense of local patriotism and a separateness to the rest of Scotland. Orcadian poet Edwin Muir once infamously disparaged Scotland as “a sham nation”. In his History of Orkney of the late 1700s, George Low noted that Orcadians were reserved in their sentiments, honest in their dealings with one another, but “studious to conceal their gains”, while also being tenacious in their preservation of old customs. A politeness and civility also seems to pervade the islands, one now sadly absent in many other parts of Britain.

By modern standards, Orkney remains basically monocultural. Of course, the very idea might seem impolite and déclassé in a society where diversity is now promoted as a foundational value. For progressives, monocultures seem unacceptable, exclusionary things, in need of correction. However, Orkney’s monocultural strength makes it far easier for incomers to fit in. Unlike most of Britain, Orcadians set a cultural tone into which new arrivals can assimilate. The setting of clear rules and norms make it easier for outsiders to find a place in the community. It’s not uncommon for settlers from the south, called ferry-loupers, to give their Orkney-born children names such as Erland, Thorfinn and Mangus.

As large states like Britain become increasingly divided, I can see the attraction to Orcadians of re-uniting with their Nordic brethren. There’s a reason the UK government would resist these ideas out of hand though. The oil might be running out, but Orkney played a pivotal part in Britain’s naval operations in both world wars. It was in Scapa Flow that naval aviation was born in 1917, when Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning first landed an aircraft on a moving ship at sea. The loss of the Northern Isles would be a serious strategic loss to the United Kingdom.

While it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Orkney would be permitted to leave — only last week, the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: “There is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK” — an exit from a newly independent Scotland would seem much more promising. After all, if arguments of history and self-determination are ever to grant independence to Scotland, the very same would apply to Orkney. And this is where an even more practical issue would emerge: resources. A fledgling independent Scotland would struggle to balance its budget. Indeed, it may even be uncertain of how to pay its pensions — and in what currency? Without the unwarranted fiscal largesse of the Barnett formula, used to calculate the overall level of funding allocated by the UK Treasury to devolved governments, so-called “Highland economics” would be brutally applied by Holyrood.

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It is in these circumstances that the prospect of self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the Faroe Islands, might suddenly suit Orkney very nicely. Who wouldn’t wish to be part of a Norwegian state that boasts a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund?

Orcadians are acutely aware from their surroundings that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and that political jurisdictions are transitory. The archipelago resembles a pin cushion of archeological sites spanning from the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Stones of Stenness to Pictish brochs from 200 BC, to Viking drinking halls from a mere thousand years ago. What an irony it would be if an Orkney earldom lost to Norway in 1472 through lack of money was lost centuries later by Scotland for the very same reason.

Swedish authorities condemned Paludan’s actions, while also reminding the world that the nation is committed to freedom of expression. Islamic authorities, meanwhile, have responded with outrage. Several countries have issued statements condemning Paludan — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Oman — as well as the Scandinavian governments for offering police protection to those who would commit such blasphemy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan also issued two statements, one calling on Islamic countries to adopt a joint stance towards such acts, and another asking the Swedish government to take concrete action to punish the culprits.

If it does not, the consequences could be severe. Sweden has been pushing to join Nato since shortly after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. But in order to join the alliance, it needs the approval of every single nation already in it — and that includes Turkey. Even before Paludan’s stunt, President Erdogan’s administration wasn’t particularly inclined to welcome Sweden, which it had repeatedly accused of enabling Kurdish militants. And in retaliation, Turkey promptly suspended talks on Nato expansion. “So you will let terror organisations run wild on your avenues and streets and then expect our support for getting into Nato. That’s not happening,” the outraged President said.

“Erdoğan and his administration have… framed themselves as defenders of Sunni Muslims throughout the world and thus were obligated to react strongly,” explains Tom Lord, co-founder of the Militant Wire research network. Even if Turkey backs down, there is “a chance that Sweden’s accession could be leveraged by Erdoğan’s administration to gain concessions from the US and certain EU countries”.

But exclusion from Nato is not the only consequence Sweden could face. Paludan’s Quran-burning has sparked an extremely hostile online backlash from a range of jihadist groups. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP), Afghan Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and the central Asian Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) have condemned Sweden, though the tone and optics of the condemnations differ. The TTP’s release — issued by its spokesman Muhammad Khorasani — is more politically calculated and mild in its language, resembling the statement published by the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan. Khorasani states that freedom of speech should not overstep the respect for Islamic symbols, rituals and values, arguing that acts such as Paludan’s constitute a violation of “so-called international law” that global organisations should address — or else dangerous consequences will follow.

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At the other end of the spectrum, though, the Islamic State’s Af-Pak branch directly threatened and encouraged retaliatory attacks. It also impugned Islamic countries for issuing cowardly statements and staging weak protests without taking any practical action against the perpetrators and their countries of origin. Indeed, the response to the Quran-burning has caused tension not only between Sweden and Islamic groups, but between Islamic groups with different agendas. Pro-Al-Qaeda jihadist Hani al-Sibai issued a statement expressing anger not only against Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but also Arabic countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. He called for the “liberation” of Islamic countries from their regimes, which he described as puppets in the hands of the West.

Meanwhile ISKP took advantage of the incident to challenge its regional enemy, the Taliban. It mocked the interim government, saying that while it claims to have defeated the US in the name of jihad, it issued just a single tweet to condemn the desecration of the Quran in Sweden — while also receiving funds from the Swedish government and protecting foreign organisations. In the latest issue of the magazine Khorasan Ghag, published by ISKP mouthpiece Al-Azaim, the group dedicated several pages to blasphemous acts, threatening to conduct attacks not only in Sweden, but against European citizens wherever they are. Lashkar-e-Jhagvi, which recently resurfaced with its first attack in Pakistan after years of silence, issued a similarly bellicose statement, threatening Europeans with more attacks and lamenting that Muslim organisations with money and power are not taking direct action. Other pro-IS networks did likewise, promising to bring the bloodshed to the streets of Stockholm and wage war on Sweden, saying the “infidels” will continue burning Qurans if Muslims do not take up arms and instil fear into their Western enemies.

All these threats cannot be taken lightly, given the history of blasphemy-motivated terrorism in the West, and Europe in particular, in recent decades. The best-known examples include the beheading of Samuel Paty, the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and last year’s stabbing of Salman Rushdie. But there is an extensive history of plots and attacks targeting the citizens of countries where anti-Islam events take place. In 2005, after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad, a series of demonstrations and attacks were carried out. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist, was targeted in two assassination attempts in 2008 and 2010. The first plot was foiled by Danish intelligence, which busted a three-man cell made up of two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent; the second attempt was orchestrated by a would-be attacker with links to Al-Qaeda’s East Africa branch, Al-Shabaab.

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Around the same time, in Sweden, similar assassination plots targeted Lars Vilks, who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad for a newspaper in 2007. Both Westergaard and Vilks survived repeated attempts on their lives. But when both died in 2021 — the former of illness and the latter in a car accident — radicals from across the jihadist spectrum, from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State to Taliban, celebrated. “The impact of the 2005 Jyllands-Posten and 2007 Lars Vilks cartoon controversies on the Western jihadi movement cannot be overstated,” extremism researcher Liam Duffy explains. “Al-Qaeda was able to exploit them as a radicalising tool due to the widespread anger outside of existing extremist circles…the blasphemous incidents were seen as an attack on Islam, even graver than the foreign policy grievances levied at the United States or Britain.”

For that reason, says Duffy, “Sweden and Denmark continued to be disproportionately targeted over other Western states all the way up until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which drew the jihadists’ attention away” — for a while. Now, Rasmus Paludan’s actions have made not only him a target but put Sweden and Denmark at markedly greater risk of terrorism again. Duffy refers to one IS-aligned propaganda group, which issued a direct threat towards Sweden, saying, “if there is no check on the freedom of your expression, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions”, pointing out that this is a reference to legendary jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki’s influential “The Dust Will Never Settle Down” lecture, which urged violence against blasphemers in the West.

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But despite all this — despite pro-Islamic State media outlet At-Taqwa calling upon supporters to kill Paludan and carry out violence against Sweden as well as other Western nations — the far-Right leader has not been deterred. Last Friday, he again set fire to a Quran, this time in front of a mosque in Copenhagen, before promising to do this “in front of the Turkish embassy every Friday until Sweden becomes a Nato member”. A couple of days later, retorting to accusations that he is on the Kremlin’s payroll (Putin would like nothing more than to see Sweden’s Nato membership blocked), he set another Quran on fire in front of the Russian embassy in Copenhagen, while making provocative statements directed at Chechnya.

Paludan’s activities may well have put paid to Sweden’s hopes of joining Nato, which would have implications for not only Scandinavian but also European security. They have also heightened the threat of terror across the West, while potentially making Westerners everywhere a target. Such acts have in the past inspired violence against both diplomatic missions and tourists. Meanwhile, they have soured both Sweden and Denmark’s relations with Islamic governments around the world. Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have even accused the nations of enabling Islamophobia, racism and discrimination. It is striking what one man’s repugnant actions can trigger.

Next week, Danes will go to the polls — and the country is showing tiny signs of fatigue. To the casual observer it’s not at all obvious. On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, Copenhagen is a picture of harmony: cyclists glide home along supersized bike paths after their short work days; jolly pensioners sip beer on the banks of one of the inner city lakes as fit millennials pass by on their after-work jog. A pint costs an arm and a leg, partially thanks to the country’s 25% VAT rate, the third highest in the world, but, according to the surveys at least, the Danes are happy to part with a significant portion of their income for comprehensive healthcare, low-cost daycare and world-beating welfare benefits. The caring state is largely responsible for their reputation as the “happiest people in the world”, even if the Finns pushed them down to second place in the World Happiness Report this year.

Thanks to those stellar rankings, Denmark has attracted the awe of progressives overseas, most notably during the 2016 US presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders, to his own detriment, banged on about “democratic socialism” — you know, like in Denmark. What he meant was free healthcare and free university, traditional policies of European social democracy.

Denmark is not particularly socialist. Its economy is highly capitalist. In fact, it’s the easiest country in the world to do business. Taxes might be high, but capitalists also seem happy with the pragmatic “flexicurity model” pioneered by Social Democrats in the Nineties while the rest of the Western world was going all out neoliberal: Denmark weds a super-flexible (it’s easy to hire and fire) labour market with comprehensive retraining and generous financial support for the unemployed. The system works: in September, the unemployment rate was a minuscule 2.7%.

So where are the signs of fatigue? Quite simple: as in the rest of the world, Denmark’s resilience has been stretched by the after-effects of Covid and now the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis.

The Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, steered the country through the pandemic with a steady hand. Showing a decisiveness that was praised at the time, she sent Denmark into lockdown before other European countries, but then was one of the first leaders to lift Covid restrictions. Denmark’s vaccination programme was extremely well organised — something I can attest to, having moved here in the middle of the pandemic from Germany, where the response was muddled and inefficient. At the time I thought: this is the well-ordered country Germany wants to be.

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But Frederiksen made one fatal mistake: a rushed decision in 2020 to slaughter 17 million farmed mink after 12 Covid infections in humans were traced to infected animals. Hundreds of mink farmers were stripped of their livelihoods. The affair took a macabre turn when “zombie minks” resurfaced from mass graves, pushed up by gases released by their decomposition.

The cull was illegal, it turned out. Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the leader of the Danish Social Liberal Party, one of the “red bloc” parties supporting Frederiksen’s minority government, threatened earlier this month to stage a no-confidence vote over the mink scandal, forcing the prime minister to announce an election on 1 November, seven months before the end of her term.

How will she fare at the polls? In the 2019 election, Frederiksen came up with a new winning formula to grab power from the conservatives: get harsh on immigration. This meant, to the horror of other European social democrats, ramping up anti-refugee rhetoric, supporting the former government’s strict cap on refugees and continuing the internationally condemned “ghetto deal” — repackaged as a programme to fight “parallel societies” — to prevent a concentration of “non-Western” people in certain neighbourhoods.

Many Danes liked the message. In the 2019 election, the Right-wing populist Danish People’s Party was decimated, its support falling from 21.1% in 2015 to 8.6% in 2019. After Frederiksen took power, her government kept up the pressure on refugees and immigrants. Hundreds of Syrians, even well-integrated young adults in employment or higher education, continue to face deportation. Meanwhile, Ukrainians have been exempted from the “ghetto” policy and have been allowed to move into social housing emptied of “non-Westerners”, prompting accusations of racism.

Some measures seem particularly absurd, even sadistic, such as the “Jewellery Law”, implemented by the conservatives in 2016, but unchanged by Frederiksen. It allows police to confiscate cash and valuables from refugees to pay for their stay in Denmark. Here, again, Ukrainians have been officially exempted. The thing is: since the law was enacted, very few confiscations have actually taken place. The real purpose was to scare refugees away, it seems, not unlike ads Denmark ran in Arab media during the Syrian refugee crisis with the message: “Don’t even think about coming here. You’re not welcome.” Psychological pressure is also put on non-Western immigrants who have lived in Denmark for years to “repatriate”, as shown in a documentary by exiled Zimbabwean writer Tendai Frank Tagarira.

For Frederiksen, all this is consistent with her idea of social democracy. Recently she said: “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration, and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.”

In spite of her hardline stance, three Right-wing populist parties are still vying for the anti-immigration vote: the Danish People’s Party, the New Bourgeois, and the wet-behind-the-ears Danish Democrats, led by former immigration minister Inger Støjberg, who once gained notoriety by baking a cake to celebrate 50 ways she had made life tougher for immigrants. Even by Danish standards, Støjberg’s fanatical style was seen as too radical when she ordered the separation of couples in asylum centres where one partner was under 18. Parliament stripped her of her job and she was sentenced to 60 days in prison. Now her face adorns lampposts across the country. Her messaging, which includes rants against liberal, out-of-touch Copenhagen urbanites — a classic from the populist playbook — is landing the Danish Democrats around 9% in surveys.

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Immigration, however, probably won’t be the big vote-winner in this election. After all, the Social Democrats’ approach doesn’t differ substantially from the Right’s policies. So what issues are resonating with voters? The sense of urgency over climate change present in 2019 has made way for fears about rising energy costs and inflation. Frederiksen is promising new programmes to dampen the economic impact on ordinary people.

Another battlefield is the growing crisis in health and social services. Thanks to poor working conditions during and after the pandemic, around 2,400 nurses are lacking in public hospitals. In an open letter, Danish surgeons expressed their fears that they are unable to operate on patients fast enough. There is also a severe shortage of workers in daycare. And other dark clouds are gathering, too: Antidepressant use is sky-high; the cancer rate is the world’s highest; young Danes are unhappier than ever; life expectancy is lower than in Germany.

After this election, unlike any Danish social democrat before her, Mette Frederiksen hopes for an alliance with the centre-Right rather than with traditional Left-wing and green allies. She says this is the best way to tackle the country’s looming problems. At 27%, her party leads the polls, but the “blue bloc” leads by Venestre (literally “Left” but actually conservative) has a good chance of governing with its Right-wing allies.

In the final scene of Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic masterpiece Melancholia, sisters Claire and Justine sit with Claire’s son Leo in a “magic cave”, a transparent teepee made of branches. The three hold hands as a giant planet engulfs the Earth. A burst of flame, a roar and then nothing. When I rewatch this scene I can’t help but think of Denmark and its anxieties. Danes still believe in their protective magic cave — no matter what the contemporary world of pandemics, globalisation, and immigration may throw at them. But change is coming, whether they like it or not.

The messaging had a familiar ring to it: politicians, Åkesson reiterated, had for too long been allowed to make Sweden “uglier, poorer and more dangerous”. It was time to take the power back. “Sweden will be good again,” was the title of the video. Not quite “make Sweden great again”, but close enough.

While Britain, the US and most of Europe have seen populist parties, populist candidates and populist party factions move into power, Sweden remains the outlier. Despite steadily growing support for the Sweden Democrats, the party has effectively been powerless since it won its first seats in parliament 12 years ago.

At first, the other parties simply shut them out. In 2014, six parties even made an elaborate agreement to guarantee the largest bloc passed its budgets — effectively voiding the far-Right’s mandates. The agreement fell apart less than a year afterward, which sparked a debate within the conservative coalition whether to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats or not.

It might sound odd that the conservative and centre-Right parties in Sweden have hesitated for so long. In neighbouring Denmark, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government took parliamentary support from the Danish People’s Party as far back as 2001. But the Sweden Democrats are an odd shrub in the Scandinavian Right-wing flora. While its far-Right sister parties in Denmark and Norway started out as fairly standard Right-wing populists, the Sweden Democrats has roots in racist and neo-Nazi organisations.

The Swedish Democrats, as Anders Ygeman, now a government minister for the Social Democrats, once told a Danish newspaper, “was founded by people who celebrated the German occupation of Denmark and not the Danish liberation”. This is perhaps a bit pointed, but the Sweden Democrats’ troublesome history is a fact that no one questions: the party’s own white paper about its history, released just a couple of months ago, basically confirmed that it was founded by people from different racist groups.

It has been a difficult couple of years for the conservative and liberal bloc. Despite a solid, non-socialist majority in parliament, the Social Democrats have held on to power because no consensus has emerged as to how to handle the Sweden Democrats. In the last election four years ago, the Sweden Democrats gained 17.5% of the vote, making it largely impossible for conservatives and liberals to form a government without their support. After months of negotiation, the Centre Party in the end jumped fences and decided to support the Social Democratic prime minister.

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Now, the other three parties in the former centre-right coalition — the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats — have decided to take the Faustian Bargain and ally themselves with the far Right. Will centre-Right voters follow suit? Ever since the Moderate Party began its reluctant courtship with the far-Right, it has siphoned off voters. Since the election of 2014, the last election in which they had a clear line against the Sweden Democrats, they have lost more than a fifth of its support — which is now down to 18% in the most recent polls.

In order to win, they need some of those voters to come home again. Or at least choose the Christian Democrats or the Liberals. The polls suggest the race is too close to call. In any other country, this would be a pretty good environment for the Right-wing bloc to take power. Law and order issues are higher on the agenda than they have ever been in a Swedish election, inflation is running rampant, and households fear what their electrical bills will look like this winter.

The rise in crime, in particular, is a weak spot for the governing Social Democrats. So far in 2022, the Swedish police have registered 47 killings and 273 shootings, putting this year on track to be the deadliest in a series of violent years. Reports of innocent passers-by getting killed or injured also strike a new kind of fear in people. On August 19, less than month before the election, a man was killed and a woman was seriously injured by a teenage shooter at a shopping mall outside of Malmö.

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But for many liberal, or even conservative, voters, it is difficult to opt for the Moderate Party or the Liberal Party this year, since a win will inevitably lead to a big influence — and maybe even government posts — for the Sweden Democrats. The far-Right party will likely become the biggest part of the new Right-wing bloc and have insisted that they won’t settle for providing passive support, although they don’t appear to seek the prime ministerial post.

At the same time, however, many Swedes are aligned with the Sweden Democrats on some of their policy proposals. One telling data point is that about a third of all voters say the party have the best migration policy. Many voters also associate the rise in gang-related shootings to the steep rise in migration over the last decade.

But there is more to its package than just a curb on migration. Prominent Sweden Democrats’ MPs have in the last couple of years put forward a host of illiberal proposals, such as control over the Swedish bar association, a replacement of all police chiefs in the country, more government control over the media and so on. In a column for the liberal weekly Expressen, the political editor Anna Dahlberg calls it an “incredibly difficult” choice for voters to make, but still comes to the conclusion that “good liberals” can vote for the Right on Sunday. Other famous liberals — such as the former Liberal Party leader Bengt Westerberg — have come to the opposite conclusion. Last week, he announced that he won’t vote for his old party, citing its decision to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats.

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Perhaps most peculiar are the many issues that are completely absent from the election. Neither the country’s Nato accession nor its pandemic strategy are on the agenda. Instead, it all seems to boil down to whether to let the far-Right in or not. The Social Democrats appear to have come to the same conclusion. One of their key messages is what a gamble it is to let the Sweden Democrats near power. As polls now show the Sweden Democrats becoming the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats have asked for one-on-one debates with Åkesson, instead of with the Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson, to hammer home their message. The Green party leader went one step further in a radio debate recently, calling Åkesson a “Nazi”.

Will this be enough? Certainly, Swedes appear to genuinely fear the rise in crime, and they don’t trust the current government — with its pro-migration coalition parties — to deal with it. On Sunday night, we will know which fear is stronger: the fear of crime or the fear of the far-Right.

And yet conservatives — particularly in Britain’s currently-flailing governing party — have a lot to learn from Sweden. The foreign obsession with the nation’s vaguely socialistic welfare system is myopic — and is happily beginning to wane. Increasingly, Sweden is receiving attention for its remarkable economy. There is enthusiastic talk of the Nordic tiger economies at Davos, while pro-business publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times praise the Nordic model of capitalism. The former praised Sweden’s economy for being “as strong as Pippi Longstocking”; indeed, the nation close to tops international rankings when it comes to economic clout and innovation, as well as quality of life.

Behind this success lies a moral logic that defies the stereotype that Sweden is based on collectivist values such as equality and solidarity. Upon closer inspection, it appears that the lynchpin of the Swedish social contract is an alliance between the state and the individual — one I have named “statist individualism”. In our high-trust society, the state is viewed more as friend than foe. This contrasts sharply with the Anglo-Saxon suspicion of the state, which is combined with a stress on “family values” and the supposed virtues of civil society. In Sweden, the state is welcomed as a liberator of individuals from traditional, unequal, hierarchical and patriarchal organisation — including the family, ethnic and religious communities, and charities.

If we look at the historical emergence of modern Sweden, it becomes clear that far from engaging in classical socialist policies, such as nationalising banks or private enterprise, Swedish Social Democrats made their peace with capitalists and businessmen in the late Thirties, having learned some hard lessons at the polls in 1928. Instead of radically re-organising the economy, they turned to a far more popular political agenda, namely social and family policy.

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The common denominator for this political struggle was the goal of eliminating the need for charity and philanthropy. It was commonly seen as demeaning to receive alms, cap-in-hand, even if it created a warm, fuzzy feeling in the bellies of the givers. The central aim of the social movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was to replace charity with rights. The essence of the new social contract was clear and simple: citizens have both the right and duty to work, and to pay taxes, which finance social rights and common infrastructure. The fundamental logic was one of reciprocity over charity, autonomy over dependence, voluntary relations over inscribed familial duties. In practice, this entailed the gradual introduction of social and family policies, reforms of the tax system, and institutions that served to free individuals — the working class, women, children — from unequal power-relationships.

This social contract depends on what I like to call “the Swedish theory of love”. Authentic human relationships are possible only between autonomous and equal individuals who enter voluntarily into close relations. This is, of course, shocking news to those many non-Swedes who believe that interdependency is the very stuff of love. But in Sweden this ethos informs society as a whole. Despite the traditional image of Sweden as a collectivist social democracy, comparative data from the World Values Survey suggests that Sweden is possibly the most individualistic society in the world.

In 1971, for instance, the nation introduced individual taxation. In perhaps the most radical reform in modern Sweden, the individual — not the family — was symbolically and fiscally recognised as the fundamental unit of society. Even 50 years later, individual taxation is rare globally. In the United States, for example, the family is the fundamental economic unit; the first question on the tax return is: “Are you head of household”? If one checks “yes”, the follow-up question is: how many dependents do you have? The figure then translates into deductions and tax advantages.

In Sweden, these questions would be unthinkable. Indeed, the very purpose of the 1971 reform was to promote female labour participation, which was effectively discouraged before (if a woman began earning money her additional income would be heavily taxed). The tax reform was then followed up by the introduction of universal daycare to make it possible for both parents to work while also having children.

There were several other key reforms during this period. Student loans were offered to all, regardless of income or family wealth. Corporal punishment of children was outlawed; indeed, there was a much stronger emphasis on children’s rights than parental rights. The legal and financial obligation to care for the elderly was transferred from the family to the state.

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It seems mysterious that a nominally socialist country could sport such a powerful brand of capitalism. But note the harmony between the Swedish model and the fundamental principle of the market — that the basic unit of society is the individual, and a central purpose of policy should be to invest in human capital and maximise individual autonomy. That is the key to the vitality of the Swedish economy.

This emphasis on individualism and free enterprise is also what makes the Swedish model so attractive not only to Social Democrats devoted to equal opportunity but also to Swedish Conservatives and market liberals — who favour the investments in human capital and opportunities for social mobility that are so central to an efficient market society. For liberals of this bent, the large role afforded to the state is rendered reasonably palatable, as the rhetorical focus shifts from the social welfare state to what I like to call the “individual investment society”.

But what works for the Swedish centre-Right might not sit well with the British Conservatives. Some may agree that the goal of combining social security with free enterprise is laudable in the abstract. Yet when it comes to embracing Swedish-style statist individualism, a number of considerable obstacles would seem to loom. Not only might one expect resistance from social conservatives for whom family values and communitarian Big Society ideals are dear, but both Truss and Sunak also seem more interested in invoking Thatcher and and on lowering taxes and limiting state power.

The radical individualism of Sweden also causes problems for the Anglo-Saxon Left, not least the “progressive” Left that has largely abandoned economic policy and civic universalism in favour of multiculturalism and the politics of identity. The focus is on culture war tactics, meaning the majoritarian politics aimed at actually taking control of the state are abandoned. Instead, the Left devolves into a cacophonic coalition of often conflicting group claims.

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Ultimately, the modern, Anglo-Saxon Left and Right both adhere to communitarian rather than individualist values and ideals. On the Right we find a romantic view of the traditional family, of charities and churches; on the Left we encounter a celebration of “community” and identity-based groups that, it is argued, warrant special regard and recognition, and repayment for past sins, from slavery to discrimination.

Just as the Swedish experience suggests individualism does not lead to narcissism, alienation and anomie, it also shows that the only possible common denominator for an inclusive, just and sustainable social contract is the individual citizen. In the realm of voluntary society, we may well freely choose to associate with those who are like us in various ways — on the grounds of faith, ethnicity, sports or stamp collection. But the state would do well to stay focused on the individual citizen when it comes to the logic of rights and duties. Sweden’s individualistic, civic universalism was built on an optimism that set aside grievances relating to past victimhood. Unlike today’s British conservatives or identity-driven activists, it looked ahead.

Lars Trägårdh is, with Henrik Berggren, the author of The Swedish Theory of Love, available on 30 August. 

In 2015, we experienced our own form of cultural revolution, with many of the same symptoms as its more potent sequels in America, Britain and elsewhere. Before “Trump derangement syndrome” was a thing, people in Sweden were denouncing each other, unpersoning each other for wrongthink, and having frenzied public struggle sessions.

At the time heterodox or dissident Swedish thinkers (a group I certainly belong to), almost regardless of political background, thought of the dramatic social and political convulsions gripping our country as stemming from something particular and unique to Sweden itself.

This collective madness gripping Sweden between 2015 and 2018 seemed so uniquely Swedish, that we assumed something akin to it would be impossible to replicate outside of our country. In 2016 and 2017, this argument made sense. The refugee crisis, supposedly the underlying cause of it all, was a Europe-wide phenomenon. Yet our Scandinavian neighbours — our historical and cultural kin — seemed unaffected. They not only took in far less refugees than we did, but also seemed immune to the political polarisation and, quite frankly, the form of social psychosis that became very common in Sweden at the time.

The cause of Sweden’s “special period”, which lasted between late 2015 and late 2018, looked (superficially) simple: the refugee crisis, and the bigger issue of immigration. In this reading, the timeline is as follows: the death of the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, and the spread of an image of his body washed ashore on a Turkish beach, helped light a humanitarian fire in Swedish society. This in turn caused increasing polarisation and anger directed at the selfish or “backsliding” Swedes who took a different position on refugees. They were too racist, too set in their ways, or too self-interested to heed the humanitarian clarion call.

In this telling, the tumultuousness of Sweden during these revolutionary years comes down to the refugee issue. The now familiar elements of a social panic that became a part of everyday life during those years, such as the public shunning of people over political disagreements, the doublespeak engaged in in order to avoid ending up as targets of social abuse, and the suppression of recent history in favour of constructing a sort of political “Year Zero” were all explained away as stemming from an overabundance of humanitarian enthusiasm. People really cared about refugees, and in their enthusiasm, things maybe got a bit out of hand. But is this really what happened?

There is a grain of truth to these claims of humanitarian enthusiasm. For a short period, donations to — and volunteers for — civil society organisations dealing with refugees exploded. Unfortunately, these explosions often turned out to be fairly shallow and counterproductive. Organisations were inundated with items like toys and clothing meant for small children, even as most of the people coming to the country were older men.

Pointing this out, however, was a risky proposition. The accusation of being a racist, and its attendant risk of social and financial ruin, loomed very large indeed. A lot of things became unspeakable during those years, including the question of demographics, to the immense financial strain that was being placed on various municipalities, to the larger question of what sort of negative consequences, the unprecedented pace and scale of migration to Sweden could lead to.

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Ironically, one of the reasons Sweden is far less polarised today than many other Western countries is probably the belated discovery that these consequences of immigration are in fact very real, and that methods of ”shaping the narrative” cannot really change material reality.

More critically, there is the realisation that nobody — certainly not middle class progressives — wants to live with those consequences at all. Crime, overcrowded schools, social and ethnic tensions, and violence toward ethnic Swedish children committed by gangs of immigrants have all conspired to cool attitudes on the subject. Indeed, the word förnedringsrån (literally “humiliation-robbery”) has now entered the Swedish lexicon as a term for robberies that display a particular sort of sadistic cruelty, where the aim of the perpetrators mostly seems to be to inflict pain and humiliation onto their victims. As such, it is hardly surprising that the recent fall of Kabul to the Taliban was not in fact met with calls to increase Sweden’s humanitarian commitment, but rather with conspicuous silence, except for a speech by Prime Minister Löfven promising that the country would “never return to the days of 2015”.

With the benefit of hindsight, immigration now appears not as a question important in and of itself, but as a form of wedge corresponding to a very particular political moment of establishment fear and anger at parts of their own electorate. The Right populist Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010, but many were convinced they were a passing fad that would soon be gone. In 2014, however, they had more than doubled their vote share, becoming the third biggest party in the Riksdag. This caused an immense amount of political anxiety among the “chattering classes” in the weeks and months following the election, in a preview of the shock caused by Donald Trump.

Sweden entered a political and social state of exception similar to the one experienced by the US after the 2016 election. Rather than an explosion of blind humanitarianism, the way the refugee crisis affected Sweden should probably be better understood as an explosion of political anxiety of the urban middle classes.

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The battle lines drawn up during the refugee crisis were very simple: on the one hand, you had the deplorables (though this term was not yet in use in 2015). They were the enemy. They hated immigrants, gays, and women. This hatred didn’t stem from being the losers of a particular set of economic policies. No, the “hatred” of “those people” came from a general odiousness, lack of education and moral fibre. The professional and managerial classes who opposed the plebs cast themselves as friends and allies of humanity itself.

Sweden was a portal into the future. The intense polarisation of 2015-2018 followed the now extremely familiar Western pattern of rural vs urban, “anywheres” vs “somewheres”. In 2015, the real fear and hatred of the (mostly imaginary) SD-voting country bumpkin could suddenly, miraculously be drawn in stark terms: good versus evil, humanitarianism versus selfishness.

But now, years later, we can see that these battle lines were a fantasy. The narratives of uneducated deplorables meanly trying to keep their children from interacting with immigrants have been replaced by the reality: Swedish middle-class families go to great lengths to avoid their own kids mixing with immigrants in school. They worry about the academic implications — not to mention the risk of violence and disorder — of letting the immigrants into “their” schools. Sweden’s permissive system of private charter schools, though often attacked for reflecting some sort of neoliberal logic, is in practice a way for many parents to self-segregate their children.

Sweden, being a historically egalitarian and homogenous country, never engaged in city planning meant to keep the poor from meeting the rich. The ability of the middle-classes to isolate themselves from the less desirable consequences of immigration has collapsed; with people living in extremely well-to-do neighbourhoods such as Stockholm’s Strandvägen now complaining about street racing, thefts, and drug dealing out in the open.

As a result, some of the fighters for the acceptance of refugees during the crisis years have later partaken in or even led local protests against mixing immigrant and native born students in the same schools. A decision taken in Trollhättan to bus kids from migrant areas to other schools met fierce protests in late 2020. One of the leaders of this revolt? The former liberal party politician, Rita Svensson, who had been on the record in 2016 as advocating for students to be given bus cards in order to break segregation.

Identifying the cause of fighting the deplorables with the cause of accepting immigrants backfired for the urban middle-classes. They find themselves caught between two imperatives. On one hand, the political ”interlopers” who do not share their own sensibilities (or their naked class interests) that have so ominously been ”emboldened” by the Sweden Democrats, represent a threat to the natural political order. Just like in the UK, everyone blithely accepted that globalisation’s losers would have ”no other choice” but to vote for the same parties that engineered their dispossession. On the other hand the middle-classes have discovered, like the parents of Trollhättan, that they do not like the consequences of migration. Their genteel humanitarianism has vanished.

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Today Sweden’s cultural revolution finds itself in an odd spot. An uneasy ceasefire prevails in Swedish society now. While the deplorables are still mocked, there is no bite to it anymore. SD voters are no longer at risk of having their careers cancelled. In 2021, an unspoken attitude of ”don’t ask, don’t tell” prevails.

In the areas in Stockholm where most of the country’s journalists live, it is probably less awkward to openly admit to sympathising with SD on immigration than it is to proudly proclaim that Sweden is far from full and ought to take in at least a million more Afghans in the next couple of years. The hard, eliminationist edge of Swedish politics is mostly gone; wrongthinkers should perhaps be subtweeted on Twitter, but they shouldn’t necessarily be fired, driven out into the wilderness, or subjected to violence.

In some ways, this turn toward ”moderation” in Swedish politics is a good thing. Outside of the inner core of the progressive sphere, such as NGOs and universities, you can no longer be summarily fired for sympathising with a party that has the support of between a fourth and a fifth of the nation. The radicals are slowly abandoning their old cancel culture methods, in favour of such quaint notions as having democratic debate (the horror!).

But it’s doubtful that the Swedish example ought to inspire optimism elsewhere. After 2014 the “losers of globalism” made their play for political relevance, pitting themselves against the urban middle-classes who dominated the political scene. A year later, those same urban middle-classes had declared a no holds barred war against the “enemy within”. In Sweden’s case, the casus belli of that war — accepting a historically unprecedented amount of refugees in a very short time, without contemplating the consequences of doing so — created a situation where the issues of immigrant crime, cultural shock, and ethnic violence became more odious than the deplorables themselves.

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Sweden was in many ways the first Western country to noisily declare war on a growing segment of its own population. In 2015, the social madness gripping the country made it seem like a fairly unique outlier, briefly confirming the deeply held national exceptionalism that makes up part of our country’s national ideology.

Today, it is clear that Sweden was simply the canary in the coal mine; just a couple of years later, many other Western countries would noisily be at war with their own homegrown ”deplorables”. Political demonisation against the internal enemy continues to grow. “The unmasked”; “the unvaxxinated”; “chuds”; “magatards”; “Brexiteers”. All of these labels, as it turns out, are incredibly malleable and thus politically useful.

And while that war has at least temporarily cooled down in Sweden itself, the way in which it did so looks likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

He contended that the difference in infection and death rates between countries would come out in the wash, regardless of their lockdown policies and promised to return in a year’s time to review the evidence.

But he makes no bones about his mistakes. When I remind him of his prediction that countries would end up with similar results after a year, he readily concedes he was mistaken. “One of the things I got wrong a year ago is the rate of spread of this disease. I thought it would spread quicker. And I also thought it would be more similar in different countries. We can see now that there are big differences in the rates of spread in between countries. It may have to do with lockdown, it may have to do with cultural things in these countries. But there is a big difference between countries.”

The difference that is most commonly cited in the ‘case for the prosecution’ against the Swedish strategy is the following chart showing Sweden’s deaths per million dramatically exceeding its neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This is generally considered solid proof that the Swedish strategy failed.

Johan Giesecke disagrees: “The differences between Sweden and its neighbours are much bigger than people realise from the outside — different systems, different cultural traditions…If you compare Sweden to other European countries [such as the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium] it’s the other way round. On the ranking of excess mortality, Sweden is somewhere in the middle or below the middle of European countries. So I think it’s really Norway and Finland that are the outliers more than Sweden.”

Explaining what he means by cultural differences, he mentions among other factors that “they’re more sparsely populated. There are less people per square kilometre in these two countries. There are also much fewer people who  were born outside Europe living in these two countries.”

So, crucially, if Sweden had instituted a hard lockdown and shut the border earlier, would its death rate have been closer to its Nordic neighbours? “Maybe not,” he says, “I think we would still have more deaths than they have.”

He is also fairly dismissive of charts currently showing that Sweden has the highest level of infection in Europe:

“I don’t think you should compare countries now, while we are still in the pandemic. You should wait until the pandemic has receded before we start comparing countries. If you did that chart a month ago it would be very different. And a month from now? I don’t know but it would be very different. These snapshots may not show the whole truth.”

Compared to the UK, Sweden ranks 23 in the world in terms of Covid deaths per million, and the UK ranks 11 —so on the most important measure of all, Sweden has had a better result. In fact, as the above chart shows there are strikingly similar patterns of deaths over the past 12 months in the two countries.

“They’re very similar,” says Gieseke, “And yet one of the countries has had three severe lockdowns and the other has only had voluntary or mostly voluntary measures. That tells us something I think.”

What does it tell us?

“That lockdowns may not be a very useful tool in the long run.”

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Did Sweden get Covid wrong?

By UnHerd

In our first interview, the Professor speculated that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) could be as low as 0.1% and that over 50% of people would shortly be revealed to have already had the virus once antibody testing became widespread.

We now know that the IFR for countries like the UK and Sweden is between 0.5% and 0.9% and that antibody testing has persistently revealed disappointingly small prevalence. Even now, after tens of millions of people have had Covid in the UK and a further 32 million have been vaccinated, antibodies are only estimated to be present in 55% of people.

“Two things I really got wrong (there are probably more things, but two big things). One is that the vaccine came so fast. I had no idea that we would have a vaccine within a year… The other thing is the rate of spread — I overestimated it, I thought it would spread much faster than it did.”

Giesecke was critical, last year, of Prof Neil Ferguson’s forecasts of up to 510,000 deaths in the UK from an unmitigated epidemic, 250,000 from a mitigated epidemic and as few as 20,000 with a suppression strategy. But with over 130,000 deaths in the UK, I ask, Ferguson’s numbers don’t look so wrong any more, do they?

“You may be right,” he concedes. “There is quite a difference between half a million and 130,000 — but, yep.” Put together, I suggest, these errors — a wrong estimate of the fatalities, the wrong percentage of people infected and an overly pessimistic expectation of the vaccine roll out — add up to getting the overall picture very wrong. So does that mean that his rejection of lockdowns at that stage was wrong, too?

“No. Sweden has had rather severe restrictions, but we based them on voluntary participation by the inhabitants instead of using laws and police. A lot of people in the world seem to think that Sweden did nothing about the Covid pandemic. That’s wrong. The entire population changed their way of living and it had profound effects on daily life for millions of Swedes, even though you weren’t fined if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I would still advocate the Swedish model, even knowing all that.”

Although he concedes that some lives may have been saved, he believes that the successes of the Swedish approach over the past year should be considered in the balance:

“Look at the good things with the Swedish system…. One is the schools: we are not destroying the future for classes of children. Another is that Sweden kept to its international agreements — for example in the EU you are not supposed to close your borders with other countries, but that has happened in several countries in Europe. We have made it possible for small businesses like cafes or bicycle shops to survive the pandemic. We have kept democracy. We have trusted people. I think there are a number of benefits from not having a severe lockdown and more of them will come as we do research on this in the future.”

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A year ago, Giesecke predicted that inhabitants of a democracy would swiftly tire of lockdown, and that long-term house arrest was not a viable option. But as it turned out, the policy remained highly popular among the majority across Europe for most of the period.

“People were willing to give up more freedom than I thought they would. It worries me — there are many democratic rules and freedoms that have been curtailed. I think that may be one of the dangerous results of this pandemic.”

He regrets the recent legislation in Sweden that makes lockdowns constitutionally possible for the future. “There is a new law — a pandemic law — which gives the Government more power than it had before, and curtails part of the freedom of the Swedish population… It’s shifted power away from parliament to some extent, which is a new thing in Sweden at least in peacetime.”

Looking to the future, Giesecke can see various scenarios playing out:

“The virus may mutate so it becomes less pathogenic than it is now. It may be that it comes back in a new shape every autumn. And it may be that we’ll all have to take a new coronavaccine every year, tailored for that strain. But it is here to stay — we won’t get rid of it.”

Which is not to say the pandemic heralds the beginning of a “new normal”, or is part of a “great reset”. In fact, he is confident that the old normal will return. Once vaccinated, he believes people should return to normal:

“If you are vaccinated with two doses and wait the right number of weeks, then… you should be able to live like you did before the pandemic. This disease is sometimes seen as something supernatural, mystical, mythical — but it’s a viral disease like all other diseases. More dangerous than some of them, but it’s not unique, Covid. So a proper vaccine used correctly protects you and means that you don’t infect other people as well…. No vaccine is 100% effective, but we don’t have this discussion about any other vaccine.”

He has been vaccinated with the AstraZeneca jab, and would be happy for  everyone to take it: “If we really want to get down to small numbers — we won’t eradicate it, but to small numbers — then I think even children should be vaccinated… I can’t see why not.”

Giesecke had a long and prestigious career at the top of international medicine. Does he regret joining the debate so publicly, and becoming such a controversial figure?

“I hope I have done some useful things for the Swedish population. If it has been useful for me or not… the discussion in Sweden has been very politicised and very divisive.”

He believes that history will judge him kindly.

“I think I got most of the things right, actually.”

After all these months, does he now think that his strategy is a failure or a success? A bit of both, he says quickly, but emphasises more of the latter:

“I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of the disease has been limited.

The failure has of course been the death toll … that has been very much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities.”

Mortality is hardly an afterthought — so why is Sweden’s mortality rate so high? At around 550 per million of population, it sits just under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries; he believes the Swedish counting system for deaths has been more stringent than elsewhere; also, countries are at different points in the epidemic cycle so it is too early to compare totals.

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The one thing he doesn’t mention in this list is that Sweden, uniquely in Europe, did not impose a mandatory lockdown at any point. Is he really claiming that this is not even a factor?

“I am not sure that it is easy to say that lockdown would make the difference … in many ways we have had a very stringent lockdown in Sweden. We have cut down on movement in society quite a lot: we have compared how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, and the decrease in travel is the same in Sweden as in neighbouring countries … In many ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think complete lockdown is the way to go for all countries … the rapidly declining cases we see in Sweden right now is another indication that you can get the number of cases down quite a lot in a country without having a complete lockdown.”

I ask again: is he claiming that lockdowns make no difference?

“We don’t know. It would have made maybe some difference, we don’t know. But on the other hand we know that lockdowns also have big other effects on public health. We know that closing schools has a great effect on children’s health in the short and the long term. We know that people being out of work also produces a lot of problems in the public health area. So we also have to look at what are the negative effect of lockdowns, and that has not been done very much so far.”

Tegnell points out the huge differences between different areas in Sweden — parts of the South that have had much lower Covid-19 than Copenhagen just over the water while Stockholm has had it much worse, despite the same lockdown policy nationwide. This he puts down to the volume of original introduction of the disease due to international travel:

“There seems to be a close connection to how many people introduced the disease at the same time… The spring holidays in Sweden are spread over four different weeks depending on different geographical regions. Unfortunately Stockholm happened to have its spring holiday just when there was an enormous spread of Covid-19 in Europe … so a lot of Swedes living in the Stockholm area came back with the disease. And that started an epidemic on a level that was much higher than the start of the epidemic in the South of Sweden, or in Finland or in Norway. Currently that’s to me the most likely theory – that if you have a massive introduction, it’s going to be a disease that is very, very hard to control.” Stockholm, in other words, was more like London or New York than Oslo or Helsinki in terms of introduction of the virus.

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He believes strongly that eradication — the zero-tolerance approach that is increasingly winning the day in the UK and US — is not a viable option.

“I don’t think that this is a disease that we can eradicate – not with the methods that we have right now. It might be a disease that in the long term we can eradicate with a vaccine, but I’m not even sure about that. If you look at comparable diseases like the flu and other respiratory viruses we are not even close to eradicating them despite the fact that we have a vaccine. I personally believe that this is a disease we are going to have to learn to live with.”

Many people feel that Anders Tegnell’s approach has been overly laissez-faire and that even now, he should be introducing more draconian measures. A model this week from his Health Agency suggested as many as 3000 additional deaths may be seen in Sweden in the next year — shouldn’t he do more to stop that happening?

He insists that those projections are only models, and that he hopes and expects to achieve a much better result. But he is also mindful of whether these draconian measures may do more harm than good:

“Of course we are trying to keep the mortality rates as low as possible, but at the same time we have to look at the draconian measures you are talking about. Are they going to produce even more deaths by other means than the disease itself? Somehow we need to have the discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve. Is it better for public health as a whole? Or is it trying to suppress Covid-19 as much as possible? Because getting rid of it I don’t think is going to happen: it happened for a short time in New Zealand and maybe Iceland and those kind of countries might be able to keep it away, but with the global world we have today, keeping a disease like this away has never been possible in the past and it would be even more surprising if it were possible in the future.”

One type of intervention that does not appear to have adverse effects is encouraging, or mandating, the use of masks. This has become an intensely political issue in the US and more recently in the UK. In Sweden mask use is minimal in almost all settings. Why is he not even recommending use of masks?

“One reason is that the evidence base for using masks in society is still very weak. Even if more and more countries are now enforcing them in different ways … we haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising. The other reason is that everything tells us that keeping social distance is a much better way of controlling this disease than putting masks on people. We are worried (and we get at least tales from other countries) that people put on masks and then they believe they can go around in society being close to each other, even going around in society being sick. And that, in our view, would definitely produce higher spread than we have right now.”

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The emphasis on spread of the virus to the exclusion of everything else Dr Tegnell believes is misguided, as the number of cases is less and less correlated to the number of deaths.

“Deaths are not so closely connected to the amount of cases you have in a country. There are so many other things that influence the amount of deaths you have. What part of the population gets hit? Is it the elderly people? How well can you protect people in your long-term facilities? How well does your healthcare system continue to function? How can we improve the treatment in ICUs? All of these things have been changing a lot in the past few months… Those things will influence mortality a lot more, I think, than the actual spread of the disease.”

His belief is that, in the final account, the Infection Fatality Rate will be similar to the flu: “somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of people getting infected, maybe … And that is not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu.”

On the controversial question of immunity, he suggests that a larger percentage of the population in Sweden is already immune than antibody studies suggest.

“There are a number of small studies already that show that of people who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 with PCR, not all of them develop antibodies. On the other hand we have quite a lot of evidence that falling ill with Covid-19 twice seems to be extremely rare… Obviously there is also quite a big part of the population that has other kinds of immunity and T Cell immunity is the one that is most likely.

“What we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else has changed. That means that immunity affects the R value quite a lot in Sweden today.”

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Does that mean that Sweden will be better placed to limit second waves and future flare ups than countries that have had minimal infection levels so far?

“I think it’s likely that those kinds of outbreaks will be easier to limit in Sweden because there is immunity in the population. All our experience with measles and other diseases shows that … we know that with large immunity in the population it is much easier to control the outbreaks than if you don’t have immunity in the population.

“There is now a number of countries in Europe that have a fairly low level of spread for a very long time, which is very unusual with a disease that seems to be so contagious, and where there is so little immunity in the population. If that is really a sustainable way for the disease to exist we will wait and see — I think the fall will show if it is possible or not.”

The eyes of the world have been on him for the past few months. How would he like to be judged, and when?

“It is better to have a more complete discussion around this in say 12 months, after next summer, then I think we can more fairly judge what has been good in some countries and bad in other countries.”

He has promised to talk to us again at that time. 23^rd July 2021 – it’s in the diary.