For those of us who have long been engaged in comparative European debates about the future of social democracy, the view that if it’s all right for Sweden then it must be all right for the rest of us is a well established truism. By almost any criteria of economic dynamism and social justice, Sweden, and the Nordic countries more generally, out-perform other social democratic or western industrialised countries.
Unfortunately, traditional analyses of the Swedish or Nordic success story have tended to focus on their exceptionalism. The Nordics, we are told, are successful because these are small countries with a high degree of social homogeneity and solidarity. These are countries where it has been possible to build a lasting social consensus and where the public has been willing to pay significantly higher taxes than the rest of the EU. In other words, the Nordics may be remarkable successes, but their experience is of marginal relevance to the rest of the European Union.
In this context, Robert Taylor’s recent Compass pamphlet, Sweden’s New Social Democratic Model: Proof that a Better World is Possible, proves to be a refreshing change. Taylor makes a powerful argument that New Labour – and indeed other social democratic parties across the continent – should look to the Nordic countries for inspiration. According to Taylor, Sweden provides a powerful political example for the left, given that its ‘dynamic new model proves it is not only possible but necessary for the achievement of successful modernisation that a country must combine the pursuit of economic competitiveness with social cohesion in equal measure’. This, he adds ‘also suggests that neo-liberalism, in its repudiation of basic social democratic values, is not the most effective way for creating affluent and efficient political economies’.
Taylor develops this argument through a well-informed and insightful analysis of the evolutions and relative strengths of Sweden, which he undertakes in three substantive chapters, assessing in turn Sweden’s competitiveness, its economic achievements and its pursuit of a strong society. However, while Taylor’s analysis of the reasons lying behind Sweden’s success are powerfully compelling and balanced, the lessons that he draws from this analysis, unfortunately, are not. The conclusion to the pamphlet is rife with irrelevant juxtapositions between the Swedish social democratic utopia and a supposed ultra neo-liberal society.
The point of such comparisons is not immediately self-evident, until one realises that the thrust of the argument Taylor is trying to make is that Britain today is essentially characterised by a rampant individualistic culture and a pervasive neo-liberalism. This view is also reflected in Neal Lawson’s foreword to the pamphlet, in which he argues that New Labour has given up ‘the fight to make people the masters of the market’, limiting itself to secure social justice but ‘only through economic efficiency as defined by the demands of the global market’.
From this point, balanced argument seems to be lost, with the conclusion implying that New Labour has done little more than promote labour market flexibility as a motor for growth, that it has done little to protect or preserve the ‘public realm’, and that is has bred cynicism and distrust in politics. The conclusions read more like a dogmatic moan against New Labour than a serious and considered analysis and prescription of the policy lessons to be learnt from Sweden. This is unfortunate, for what has been missed here is a real opportunity to Europeanise the British debate about the future of social democracy; a debate which has been far too insular and self-satisfied for quite some time.
First, to assert that the current Labour government has done little to tackle the legacy of the Thatcher and Major era is nonsensical. Labour provided a real alternative that was backed up with policies such as the minimum wage, welfare-to-work, the strengthening of trade union rights – the list goes on. Indeed, when some of these policies were being developed, Labour had already looked to the success of the Nordic societies for inspiration. While the welfare-to-work programme introduced after the 1997 election may have been branded in a Clintonesque fashion, the actual details of the policy implemented owed far more to the lessons of the Dutch and Danish programmes developed in the early 1990s.
And the lessons haven’t stopped there. The Danish and Swedish systems for universal day-care have inspired programmes such as Sure Start, and the long-term evidence suggests that such programmes are not only beneficial in terms of facilitating a better work-life balance for young women, they also have very positive effects on social mobility over generations.
So, Taylor’s vision of New Labour’s Britain and this government’s achievements is not only misleading, but plainly wrong. Similarly, in critical areas, Taylor fails to analyse Swedish success stories that would support the government’s current plans to modernise public services. Taylor is, of course, correct to state that there has been a strong defence of the public realm in Sweden. However, the Swedes have never, particularly in the area of public services, confused the public interest with publicly owned provision.
Across the Nordic countries, in both the fields of health and education, a plethora of service providers – public, private, non-profit and charitable – compete to offer their services to patients, students, parents and carers. Sweden has been a pathfinder in developing independent schools and has even gone so far as introducing vouchers schemes for some health services. In short, across the Nordic countries, choice has been a driver for patient and student/parent empowerment: an empowerment that has driven up the quality of publicly funded services and helped maintain broad support for them among the middle classes.
It is important, then, that discussions on the future of social democracy across Europe, to the extent that they try to draw lessons from the experiences of others, are based on balanced considerations rather than myths. This was the rationale for the debate Tony Blair began at the special summit he hosted in Hampton Court this October. It is a debate that Policy Network has contributed to, commissioning some 20 papers from academics and thinkers across the continent, five of which were submitted to the Hampton Court summit by the prime minister following a private seminar at No 10.
The unanimous view of our group of experts is that there are generally applicable lessons that Europe can derive from Nordic experience, which differ from the conventional explanations of Nordic distinctiveness, namely their commitment to building new sources of competitive advantage, market flexibility and new forms of social policy that protect people not jobs. If we are to start a serious debate on the lessons Britain can learn from Sweden and the Nordics, it is here that we must begin.