Skottland och Norden

Den 18 september är det folkomröstning i Skottland om oberoende från Storbritannien. Opinionsundersökningarna pekar mot att väljarna säger nej till självständighet bl a därför att det skotska nationalistpartiet inte riktigt lyckats förklara hur självständigt man egentligen vill bli.

I The Scotsman skriver Adrian Wooldridge, mycket Nordenkunnig redaktör på The Economist, om hur den skottska vänster (SNP) som driver självständighetskravet bl a med argumentet att Skottland skulle bli ”mera som Norden”.

Nonsens, skriver Wooldridge:

There is no evidence that the Nordics reciprocate Scotland’s infatuation; indeed, the Nordic countries are some of the most Anglophile places on earth. The Nordics compete with each other to tell British visitors how much they prefer British bands like the Rolling Stones to locally-grown naff-fests like Abba. London is one of the biggest centres of Nordic ex-pats in the world and has a flourishing eco-system of Nordic restaurants and bakeries.

The biggest problem with the SNP’s Scandimania, however, is that it is in love with a Nordic model that was traded in for a new model more than two decades ago.

The Nordics spent almost 50 years after the war trying to perfect the People’s Home. By the early 1990s Sweden’s government gobbled up three-quarters of national wealth and Sweden’s top-rate tax payers handed over almost all their income in taxes. But the People’s Home became increasingly dilapidated: Sweden went from being the fourth-richest country in Europe in the early 1970s to the 14th richest in the early 1990s, behind Britain and Italy. And the Home collapsed completely in a succession of crises in the early 1990s that saw banks collapse and interest rates rising to 500 per cent.

Since then the Nordics have introduced a radically new economic model that owes more to Thatcherism than to socialism. Sweden has reduced the size of its government from 67 per cent of GDP in 1993 to 49 per cent of GDP today and reduced its tax burden dramatically, slashing its top rate of tax by 27 percentage points since 1983, abolishing tax on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance, and cutting its corporation tax. It has also donned a golden straitjacket that obliges it to balance its budget over the three-year economic cycle.

The Nordics have gone further than Mrs Thatcher ever dreamed in reforming the welfare state. Sweden gives all children the equivalent of a school voucher and allowed private companies to run public schools. Denmark has gone even further: parents can use state money to send their children to private schools and then top it up with their own money. Private companies (many of them backed by private equity companies) run a quarter of Sweden’s primary care practices and some of its leading hospitals.