Home or Shop

Margaret Thatcher used to liken her country to her father's grocer's shop...conveniently ignoring the fact that her father's grocer's shop did not have a printing press in the attic and an arms factory in the basement.

Per Albin Hansson likened his country to a home.

With the ideal of the 'folkhemmet' he drew a line under the class struggle and set a new path for Sweden. Of course the path had political implications. But the path itself was in the land of values and not politics. Per Albin demanded that Swedes base their wider economic and social relationships on the same values that animated their personal relationships.

Recently Helmut Kohl has had the audacity to seek to evoke this metaphor of the home by talking about 'our common European Home'. That was not Per Albin 's meaning. He refused to accept the idea that his people should be 'soft' at home but 'hard' at work.

Sweden spent the next 40 years learning what their 'folkhemmet' meant in practice And they discovered that it meant far-sighted firms, a modern welfare state and solid public services...the very things that Len Hutton is calling for New Labour to deliver in the stakeholder society he describes in 'The State We're In' (1994) and 'The State To Come' (1997).

'Such things, wrote Hutton, 'do not emerge out of thin air; they need to be embedded in the institutions and patterns of incentive which sustain them - the most important being a political system which is of the people rather than above them.'

A properly funded system that underwrites the brute risks we all face - an essential component of any just society - is what is now needed. And for it to work in everybody's best interests, it must be run by a democracy which itself incorporates these values.

In this regard Sweden's needs are no different to England's...to create a polity of properly enfranchised citizens which is subject to a rule of law. And there is a world of difference between a rule of law and a rule of lawyers and arbitrary political directives of the sort emanating from Brussels and Luxembourg.

In Britain the question is whether New Labour…as careless of the liberties it removes as any the Conservatives took away in their drive to marketise society…is capable of addressing either these big needs or the smaller problems characterised by 'short-termism' and 'under investment' in Britain's public and private sectors.

But in Sweden a system is already in place, put there over fifty years by the struggle and commitment of three generations of Swedish men and women. Has the propaganda from the right led to a crisis of faith and a failure of nerve? Is there a risk that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.