One Party State

One aspect of the Swedish Model that fascinated foreign politicians, rather than economists, was the Swedish Social Democratic Party's hold on power.

This should be a subject of scrutiny by today's party of the future, Miljöpartiet de Gröna (Swedish Green Party) as they struggle to stay over the 4% threshold without any coherent strategy for turning themselves into a 40% party.

But as every business-man knows, however good your mousetrap, customers never beat a path to your door. They have to be fetched...one at a time.

And although 'parties of the future' have a rather special role to play in a democracy, at some time in their career they have to face the future square on and make the transition from a party of the future to a party of the present (see 'Evaluating Elections' in Appendix A).

This was the transition the Social Democrats made in the 1920s and 1930s. They decided to go for a collective future project that mobilised the whole Swedish population. They based their programme on the premise that they could achieve their goals by parliamentary means instead of by 'class struggle'.

The fate of a political party is not in its own hands. What happens to it depends at least as much on what the other parties do or fail to do. When looking at the Social Democratic success, the parties of particular interest are Vänsterpartiet (Socialists), Centerpartiet (Farmers Party) and Höger or Moderaterna (Conservatives).

And here it is instructive to make a comparison between Sweden and England.

In England the Fabian Society, the British Labour Party's think-tank, was making very similar noises in the 1890s to those that eventually emerged from the policy committees of the Swedish Social Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s.

'The Fabian Papers' were published in 1884 and led after four decades and one particularly nasty world war to their republication in a rather more definitive form as George Bernard Shaw's classic socialist tract, published in 1928, 'The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism'.