Not all Swedes are as happy as they might be about the decision by their elites to throw open the country’s doors a few years back.
Sweden has won plenty of praise for its openness to refugees, taking in more per head than any other European country. But it is also home to the Sweden Democrats, one of the biggest anti-immigration parties in Europe, which is polling at up to 27 per cent.
In Hasselby Strand, the Stockholm suburb in which the party received the highest percentage of votes in last year’s elections, it is not hard to find sympathisers. Elisabeth, a retired teacher, says: “I don’t like what the other parties say. The Sweden Democrats are the only ones who tell the truth.”
Her friend Anneli interrupts: “I’m not inhuman. I don’t like to see suffering. But things are difficult here. My son hasn’t got a job.”
Sweden, a country of 9.8m people, took in 80,000 asylum seekers last year and is set to welcome a similar number this year. Many are from Syria, owing to a policy that offers those fleeing the war-torn country near-automatic residency.
The seven other parties in Sweden’s parliament shun the Sweden Democrats, saying it is rooted in the neo-Nazi movement. But the Sweden Democrats have surged in the polls from 5.7 per cent in 2010 to 12.9 per cent at last year’s elections and a poll by Sentio Research this month put the party at 26.5 per cent.
While it is true that the SD’s origins are indeed disgusting (as, I would add, is much of the history of the once-Stalinist Vänsterpartiet, these days seen as a party that plays nicely with others), it is also true that it has moved on a long way from those days, if not yet far enough.
That said, the SD’s rise is not evidence that the Brown Shirts are going to be rampaging through the streets of Stockholm any time. But it is yet more confirmation of what Mark Steyn wrote here in 2014 (he was discussing UKIP at the time):
“If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones”
That’s what appears to be happening in Sweden, self-proclaimed “humanitarian superpower”.
The Financial Times:
Nicholas Aylott of Sodertorn University says consensus among the other parties on immigration has left the field open for the Sweden Democrats. “The degree to which the other parties loathe the Sweden Democrats is amazing. But the debate is now taking place on the fringes,” he says.
A revealing word, that, “loathing”, a word that signals a retreat from rational debate and another sign of that Sweden, a land where free speech is fraying at the edges, is slipping further into post-democracy.
Steyn:
On the Continent, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of a hermetically sealed elite, and with predictable consequences.
And speaking of the fraying of free speech, the Coventry Telegraph has news from Britain:
An ex-Muslim campaigner has hit out after she was banned from speaking at Warwick University when the students’ union said it was concerned she could incite hatred or offend Islam.Human rights campaigner Maryam Namazie, a member of the Council of Ex-Muslims, is well known for giving talks which challenge aspects of the religion she does not agree with.
The Iranian-born secularist was invited to Warwick University’s Students’ Union by Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society to give a talk on October 28.
But the university’s students’ union later blocked the invitation and, in a response shared by Ms Namazie, said: “This is because after researching both her and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus.
“There a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker that indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus. This is in contravention of our external speaker policy.”
The response goes on to detail other aspects of the policy including the guidance that speakers “must seek to avoid insulting other faiths or groups”.
We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus.
Meanwhile, in Germany, euphoria seems to be subsiding in the land of Willkommenskultur.
The Daily Mail has a disturbing report here. While the Mail is never knowingly under-lurid, and immigration on the scale and of the nature that Angela Merkel has encouraged is bound to set off a thousand scare stories, the source of some of these, suggests, well, something:
Yesterday, the Mail reported how social workers and women’s groups in Giessen wrote a letter to the local state parliament claiming that rape and child abuse were rife in the refugee camp.
…At a former U.S. military base housing some 2,000 migrants in Bayernkaserne, on the outskirts of Munich, women’s rights groups say there is forced prostitution and rape every day. Men, women and children sleep next to each other in tents and, according to one social worker interviewed on local TV, the camp is ‘the biggest brothel in the city’ where the price for sex with a female migrant is €10 (£7).
….At yet another migrant camp in Detmold, a city in central Germany, a 13-year-old Muslim girl was raped by a fellow migrant. The child and her mother had fled to Europe to escape a ‘culture of sexual violence’ in their own country.
Astonishingly, police kept silent about the rape, which took place in June. Only this month, after a local newspaper revealed that it had happened — and claimed German authorities are not ‘going public’ about crimes involving migrants because they don’t want to ‘give legitimacy’ to critics of mass migration — did they confirm it had taken place.
The area’s police chief, Bernd Flake, insists the official silence was meant to protect the rape victim. But he adds: ‘We will continue this policy (of not informing the public) whenever crimes are committed in migrant facilities.’
We will continue this policy of not informing the public.
We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus.
Connect the dots.