The average Finn has lost £1,500 in purchasing power. At the same time unemployment has soared. So who to blame? Why the immigrants and Europe, of course. It is rather cheesy as 95 per cent of Finland’s population were born there and such immigrants as Finland does have do all the rotten, dirty jobs that true Finns won’t do. In the 1990s, Finland was a basket case economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which bought a disproportionate amount of Finnish goods in order to keep the country neutral and unaligned. Nonetheless, the EU opened its membership to Finland and Sweden, which has always accepted a high level of Finnish immigrants, placed no restriction on people movement.

Today the True Finn movement, which has won 39 seats and 18 per cent of the vote, has to be located in the widespread European phenomenon of the rise of identity politics. Sweden down the road has its Democratic party which also offers a critique of Europe, immigration and Islam. In the Netherland, Geert Wilders, represents the same politics. In France, polls put Marine Le Pen, ahead of both Nicolas Sarkozy and any socialist candidate for the French presidential election in 2012. Look at Britain’s European parliament election figures and the True Brits of UKIP and the BNP do remarkably well. Marine Le Pen says she has dropped her papa’s barely disguised anti-Semitism, and UKIP start frothing if linked with the BNP. Yet the discourse of ‘Blame Europe, Blame the Immigrants, Blame Islam, Blame Multiculturalism’ is the new politics of the European right. William Hague introduced this melody into British politics with his famous claim in 2001 that Britain would become ‘a foreign land’ if voters re-elected Labour. David Cameron’s multiculturalism speech in Munich and then his immigrants speech shows that, far from dog-whistling, the Tories are crashingly noisy in playing these tunes.

Finland was a beacon social democratic nation after 1945. But the social democratic covenant with people there as elsewhere in Europe has been ruptured. The promise of a home, a job, free education, health and a decent pension are no longer deliverable on the present terms of trade. States everywhere are buckling as they cannot raise more and more taxes from the working and middle classes. European decency, which allows swift access to universal benefits for incomers, causes resentment as those who have contributed over years feel that their children or grandchildren are denied an affordable home or cannot get a job while people easily identified as incomers plug into state benefits.

Of course, save for the most blockhead politicians, the cultural references are kept under. Immigrants, says True Finn member Timo Soini (who just by chance is a Millwall fan) are welcome provided they work hard and pay taxes. But since by definition an immigrant is likely to be poor and do the most menial of low-paid jobs, the chances of a Somalian or Ethiopian become a net contributor to Finnish state revenue are not high. Europe is an even easier target. Forget the fabulous wealth Finland gained from the single market. Forget the fact that the totality of the EU budget represents just one per cent of Europe’s gross national income. Forget the fact that the support for Portugal or Ireland or Greece is meant to secure the profits and future of Finland’s banks which leant as stupidly as others did in the years of greed-worship Greenspanism.

No, it is wicked Europe stealing true Finnish euros and giving them to feckless Irish, Greeks and Portuguese. Of course, such politics is easy to whip into a fury. In the 1950s, it was called Poujadeism. In the 1970, it was Powellism. In the 1980s, it was Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National which won 30 seats when France held an election under PR in 1986. In the 1990s, it was the rise of the Northern League in Italy. After 2000, it was the Kaczynski twins in Poland or more recently the fact that UKIP got more votes than the Tories and the BNP got more votes than the Liberal Democrats in the Barnsley by-election.

There is a view that the more you talk about immigration and Islam, the happier voters are. The left is invited to wrap itself in flag, faith and nation though no one ever gets round to defining the faith of Britain. Catholics and Jews do not have to go back too many generations when their faiths were objects of hate and political distrust. Gordon Brown famously invoked ‘British jobs for British workers’ but the slogan blew up in his face as in pure terms it is undeliverable since British jobs depend on foreign capital – think Nissan or working for Manchester United, The Times, Santander, retail chains like Zara, H+M, or WalMart-Asda . And what colour is a British worker? Long before Tory David (Cameron) said immigrants should learn English Labour David (Blunkett) made the same point. Both are right. But should 900,000 true Brits living in Spain be required to learn Spanish? Britain should be careful before insisting on new qualifications for those living and working here in case the same requirements are imposed on our fellow nationals in other countries.

Would it not be better to make the case that modern Europe remains one of the few world regions where there are not stringent controls on people, goods, ideas, culture and capital flowing across borders. That was good for the era when Finns needed to emigrate and, if Finland become less open that era will return since an economy closed to incomers is doomed to stagnation. And that with its minuscule budget of just one per cent of Europe’s income, the modest solidarity that the EU can offer to nations in difficulty makes sense. Defaults may happen but the losers will be all the pension funds and other savings in banks that will lose 20 or 30 per cent of the value of the loans they have to defaulting countries.

But it is so much easier to rant about Europe and immigrants. Enoch Powell did it. Jean Marie Le Pen did it. Nigel Farage, Roberto Bossi and Gert Wilders do it. The shock is that it took Finland so long to become truly European and give birth to its own nationalist, populist, identity politics. The left will always finds extremely tricky the politics of nation, identity and blaming some external source for internal problems. The real answer is to fashion a material, social, and cultural response that answers some – not all, but at least in an effort at most – of the questions voters are right to pose as they see fair pay at work and fair play in society shrivel as wealth gaps widen and those who make no contribution are not required to do so.

Photo: heipmann