Separatism in the City

Another example of different laws. But this one may not work to Maori advantage.

Wellington bar owners say drunk Maori will be specifically targeted during the World Cup, by a 50-year-old law that has been pulled from the archives by police and the city council. The law allows Maori wardens to enter bars and remove drunk or violent Maori.

It'll be interesting to watch the response from Maori politicians. No doubt this form of 'privilege' - having their own, additional security force - will be labelled as discrimination. That's what the bar owners appear to see it as. In practice the whole idea looks utterly fraught.

The law means Maori wardens can stop the bar selling liquor to any Maori who appears to be drunk, violent, quarrelsome or disorderly or likely to become so.

"Likely to become so." That is a licence to turf anyone drinking.

And just how do Maori wardens go about identifying Maori? Isn't ethnicity now about self-identification? The mind boggles.

Meantime overseas visitors will be given the impression that NZ has a problem with Maori drinking similar to that seen with Aboriginal drinking in some Australian cities. Great image to carry away with them.

God-awful excuses for UK rioting

(I lived and worked in London for four years and it is the only other place in the world I have ever regarded as home or would want to make my home again, entirely because of the people who live there.)

Right on cue the socialists start to recount the reasons why young men in London, Birmingham and Liverpool are rioting. But before we read the excuses let's remember what these rioters are doing. Destroying private property and invading private homes. Thieving from and terrorising private individuals.

This isn't some sort of intellectual response to material deprivation directed at the state. It may be a subconscious, base response to emotional deprivation. That is the most generous response I can summon.

It certainly jars with the idea that the welfare state would prevent such malcontent.

Hell, these guys don't even have the balls to chance their arms at real crime with real risk. No. They create a contrived circumstance whereby they can loot and assault without consequence. Cowards. Creeps. And there is another word beginning with 'c' I have never uttered in my life. I hope those who are detained feel the full contempt of the already incarcerated in due course.

In recent months the government has tripled the cost of university tuition and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, paid to some 640,000 16-18 year olds to help them continue in higher education.

Areas like Tottenham, amongst the most deprived in the country, have been particularly hard hit. Unemployment officially stands at 8.8 percent, but will be much higher amongst young people. Claims for Jobseeker’s Allowance have risen by 10 percent in the last year, while Haringey Council has cut £41 million from its budget, reducing its youth services by 75 percent.

This is the social reality that underlies the London disturbances. It is replicated in working class areas across the country. It is the reason Cooper anticipates “repeated” disorder in the coming months.

Bad haircut

A Northampton garage owner was apparently sick and tired of thugs breaking into his garage shop to steal tools, etc. So he came up with an idea. He put the word out that he had a new Mexican Lion that would attack anyone that tried to break in or climb his fence.


Would-be thieves saw the "Lion" from a distance and fled the scene.

What's behind Paula Bennett's 'good news'?

Social Development Minister Paula Bennett says Future Focus changes implemented last September have saved taxpayers more than $6 million.

“The changes implemented last September as a pre-cursor to major reforms introduced clear obligations and greater fairness to the benefits system.”

Future Focus changes include requiring:
• Unemployment Beneficiaries to reapply if they remain on the benefit after a year and prove their eligibility to continue receiving assistance.
• DPB recipients with children over six to look for part-time work.

“This common sense approach has seen 7,400 people go off Unemployment Benefits and taxpayers have saved more than $6 million,” says Ms Bennett.

About half of the 7,400 didn’t complete the process, more than 2,000 were in work and 1,400 had left the country, were studying or just failed the work test.

“This simple policy change alone is expected to save a further $3.5 million by October,” says Ms Bennett.

Since September last year, more than 10,800 people have gone off the DPB into work.

“The number of people who’ve found jobs and gone off the DPB since last year’s welfare changes has gone up by 20 percent, that’s significant”

Prior to Future Focus changes there were 13,700 people on DPB doing some part time work and now there are 15,300.

ENDS

DPB statistics

Sept 2010 112,765
June 2011 113,429

Doesn't matter how many go off when more come on.

And those going off most likely represent short-termers best capable of gaining employment while those coming on most likely represent young unskilled and uneducated types quite likely to stay for years.

In earlier years (granted they were years of lower unemployment) MORE people were leaving the DPB and going to work with NO work-testing regime.
2004 12,773
2005 13,484
2006 16,132

One other thing. $6 million represents about 0.03 percent of the $20 billion MSD budget. Big deal. They could easily save the equivalent by dropping some of the highly paid bureaucrats.

Having just been reminded about our $300 million a week borrowing here, that also makes $6 million look skinny; not even worth the iou it was printed on.

ACT list

Naturally enough I am interested in who is on the ACT list this year. According to the NZ Herald:

On Friday it issued its list of 47 candidates, with only one identifying as Maori.

Anyone know where the list was published?

"They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad"

I love my Mum and Dad.

They came for dinner last night. A roast. Because that's all I can cook with real confidence. And my mum, bless her, says she loves my roasts. Leg of lamb. She brought the desert.

I have two close friends I grew up with and Mum and Dad consequently know them well - or knew them well as children. Recently my friends and I got together for a weekend away, one coming from Australia to visit her 90 year-old father. We banded together on a friday and took off for the Wairarapa. Inevitably 4pm - or thereabouts - saw us huddled over a bottle of wine, near an open fire, relishing being able to talk as we always have done. Without reservation and with the security of knowing each other inside out.

But it became apparent that the one who separated from her husband around 4 years ago now, had an attitude to men that was quite irrational. She was always a beauty. But in her fifties is quite convinced - no, convinced isn't the right word - absolutely certain that men are only interested in women superficially.

We dug and delved around why. Kept holding up our own experiences and others that conflicted with hers but she clung passionately to her arguments and examples. As we pushed on, it came out. Her father had always told her that men were only after one thing. He persuaded her he was right. She married early and probably thought she had found the man who was the exception to the rule. Cruelly, after many years of unquestioned faith, that man fell short and found younger (or something) targets for his affection. Of course her father had been right.

I was telling my own Mum and Dad about this. They remember her father. The family lived one house away. My Dad, without hesitation, but quiet recollection, recited the following:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Philip Larkin

My children were probably mildly shocked to hear Grandad use the f word but are mature enough to understand the context. Dear Grandad. Always makes us laugh, sometimes till we wish he would stop. Always makes us think. Never fucked us up.

But perhaps the lesson is, you will get what you expect from life. If you look for it, you will find it.

DPB cancellations due to incarceration more than double

Periodically I ask MSD for the reasons why people are leaving the DPB. Just tracking trends.

Not much stands out from today's response. Despite the new work-testing regime people are leaving for the reason 'obtained work' at no greater rate. Not when compared to the earlier 2000s.

But the following statistics are interesting enough to graph (the first years are to December; the last two are to June). Since 2002 the number of DPB cancellations due to incarceration has more than doubled.

There are increasingly more men on the DPB and more males than females go to prison from the DPB according to the 2003 Prison Census.

That's a hell of a lot of kids losing a caregiver to prison anyway and the provision of welfare wasn't enough to prevent these recipients resorting to crime, one of the major reasons advocates advance to justify it.

Greens plan is a blueprint for poverty

The Greens plan to lift 100,000 children out of poverty is unworkable and defies reason on a number of counts.

First the definition of poverty is relative. It puts a number of children below a specified threshold. Arbitrary thresholds are exceedingly troublesome in their own right. The US is currently grappling with a new and better way to measure poverty. In the UK not so long ago hundreds of thousands of children were lifted out of poverty overnight simply by moving the threshold! A move no less silly than the Green's proposal as we shall see.

In New Zealand poverty is usually defined as falling below either 50 or 60 percent of the eqivalised (adjusted for number of householders) median household income. But difficult-to-measure outgoings are just as important as incomes. Most of the 100,000 children the Greens target are in DPB homes. Yet there are nearly twice that number relying on that particular benefit. The government tries to make payments to them that are as equitable as possible. Yet some fall below the defined poverty level when others don't. Which straight away indicates that some have greater outgoings than others. For beneficiaries, outgoings are more amenable to change than incomes. Adjusting expenses will do more to alleviate their children's poverty than waiting for an income increase, all the while racking up debt.

The Greens don't want them to wait. They want a parent who does not work to receive the incentive, the In Work Tax Credit, given to a parent who does. How silly is that? Even the Human Rights Tribunal found that the government was justified in discriminating against non-working parents. If they weren't then welfare advocates could demand beneficiaries receive 100 percent of the median household income!

But just imagine for a moment the Greens achieved their desired rise in benefit payments. An abundance of international research has shown a link between level of payments and rate of unmarried births. Put simply, the more the DPB pays the more people will choose it over work. Children that enter the benefit system at birth stay the longest and subsequently cumulatively cost more. That means what the Greens have budgeted is less than the actual cost over time. But hey what doesn't grow exponentially when it comes to handouts. Paid Parental Leave is a great example. It now costs twice what Treasury initially forecast it would.

The next part of the Green's plan is to re-introduce the Training Incentive Allowance yet Treasury reported to the WWG that this allowance probably contributed to beneficiaries staying on welfare even longer ( as studying became the modus operandi?). In reality there is no case for a beneficiary to not have to get into the same debt as other students do to fund the education they choose. Exceptions only produce incentives for people to make bad choices eg having children before acquiring any means of supporting them.

Raising the minimum wage barely warrants comment. What hasn't been said, and demonstrated, before about the effect minimum wages have on overall employment? They reduce it. When the cost of labour increases, all else remaining equal, employers buy less of it. Extra unemployment incurs additional burden on the benefit system. Which means that again the Greens have under-calculated the cost of such a move.

The last part of the plan is the require rental homes to be insulated. The additional expenditure will end up in the tenant's hands as increased rent. There goes the extra benefit payment which is the first step of the grand plan.

We all know that the Greens are economically the most socialist party in the political spectrum. And we all know that socialism makes countries poor. Socialism makes children poor.

What the Greens have produced is not a plan for less poverty but a blueprint for more.

Are you a Conservative?

Are you a Conservative?

I didn't score enough to need a Conservative Party (8 out of 15). And that was an ambivalent 8 as some of the questions are multi-pronged.

Doesn't solve my problems about who to vote for come November.

Why so many NZ children are poor

Yesterday saw the release of the Household Incomes in New Zealand Report which is updated periodically. It is full of data, both domestic and international. Extremely detailed, very lengthy.

What it does usefully highlight is that many statistics are estimates which lead to considerable variation. But this quote says it all about children in poverty in New Zealand:

What can be said with certainty is that more than one in five and perhaps as many as one in four New Zealand children live in households where there is no adult in full-time employment. These rates and the rate for children in workless households are high by OECD and EU standards.

Yet New Zealand has relatively low unemployment by OECD standards.

What New Zealand does have is a very high proportion of sole parent families living on benefits. Hence the high proportion of 'workless' households.

The high proportion of sole parents, some stats say second highest in the developed world, is a result of social policy accommodation of cultural tradition and feminist dogma. Feminists will say it is the result of male failure to take responsibility but that was secondary. The policy enabled that abrogation.

The very best way - in fact, probably the only way - to reduce the poverty of New Zealand children is to get rid of the policy that creates and sustains (albeit meagrely) sole parent families.

Having more children on welfare...

...is one thing the general public is largely against.

MSD provided a paper to the WWG on the parameters of the problem.

The data matched what I had been getting through different OIA requests.

22-23 percent add a further child to an existing benefit.

I had always thought that seemed fairly low given the number of families on the DPB with more than one child. Further information in the paper explains why my instincts are probably right. The estimates...

"...only count children who were conceived while the caregiver was receiving the DPB
...count only newborns who were included in benefit on the day of their birth or within four weeks of birth and were still includede in benefit three months after birth."

People cycle on and off the benefit constantly. The deliberate adding of a child could be planned whilst off benefit; in fact, for the very reason of getting back onto one.

Here's another quote which again matches my information, or rather, lack of. The estimates...

"...are not able to separately identify whether these newborn children were added to a benefit as a result of an adoption, or a whangai or foster arrangement."

Isn't privacy taken too far when people expect support for their 'dependent' children but don't have to identify what the relationship is? And again I remind you that the whangai process is without any legal standing in NZ justice system. No wonder Maori children are particularly vulnerable.

The NZ Herald's blitz on child hunger rolls on

The NZ Herald's blitz on hungry children in New Zealand continues today with a further piece about the Waikato. Simon Collins at least has the level of objectivity required to acknowledge that the hunger was persistent through the 'economic boom', something I pointed to last week.

A five-year doctoral study by Waikato University sociologist Dr Kellie McNeill has found that charities served 25,000 free meals, Work and Income gave out 12,000 food grants and foodbanks gave out 4000 food parcels in Hamilton in 2006-07.

That was at a time when the economy was booming.

Specifically, in the Waikato, the number of unemployed beneficiaries dropped from 2,800 to 1,900 over the period. Almost a third. But the other three main benefits were flat or grew. There were around 8,000 on the DPB - half Maori.

It would be interesting to know how many of the families given food parcels or food grants were on the DPB. I am sure the researcher, given her long stint - 12 years dependent on same - would have paid attention to circumstances of hungry individuals.

It is clear that the phenomena of child poverty and child hunger are effects of the DPB. The Herald's blitz, following a series of articles about sole parents triggered by the WWG proposals, may have done society a favour by allowing subscribers to read between the lines. Relatively few signed up for the requested monthly donation to feed a New Zealand child (even though I imagine many are deeply concerned about their general circumstances). At a time when we have been seeing tragic footage streaming in from Somalia it seems almost obscene that chubby kids in South Auckland are being held up as our National tragedy.

There is growing national awareness and unease about the 'new' structure of communities; those previously 'working-class' but today largely made up of single parent families (with or without a hanger-on) whose economic hub is welfare.

The NZ Herald has contributed to this awareness. But I am not sure that they were after what is likely to be the result.

Come November the public will give National the green light to do something meaningful about welfare and the learned helplessness it induces. I just hope the public's faith in the current government is well-placed.

Crucial admission

So someone with credibility comes out and says that some boys expect to grow up and live off the mothers of their children because that is what they have grown up with. I have not a shred of doubt that Alison Sutherland is correct.

Alison Sutherland, who works in Wairarapa schools with children who have behavioural problems, says many of the boys she deals with – who haven't even reached their teenage years – can only see being the father of children and living with their mothers ahead.

"That is their career future," she said of youngsters who were opting out of education and employment because they saw babies as a source of income.

But coupled with the desire for children was a complete lack of understanding of what being a good parent might entail.

"There is no warmth about loving little children or wanting to be good parents. It is purely about this being a pathway to an income," the one-time principal of a youth justice facility school said.

"They have a perception that their future is to be unemployed. That is their norm. They have no sensitivity for the children – they see it as their form of income."

Sutherland said in some cases the children were merely repeating what they saw in their own homes.

Not mentioned is the expectation is most certainly more widespread amongst Maori. Consider recent research I previously linked to that showed those teenagers, male or female, identifying as sole Maori, were seven times more likely to become teen parents.

This is an insidious and dangerous state of affairs because, like children that are meal tickets and therefore unvalued and unloved for themselves, so are females. They will be abused in one way or another; to one degree or another.

The article goes on to say,

The sole-parent domestic purposes benefit is available to those over 18 who are not in a relationship with the other parent and do not have a partner, or who have lost their support.

Wrong.

They can be in a relationship with a partner and receive the DPB so long as it is not deemed as 'in the nature of marriage'. This involves the male not providing any financial support or emotional committment. Perfect.

Christ. I don't know what is wrong with the people who have the power to change this state of affairs yet let it continue. It is thoroughly de-humanising, immoral on any scale of values and exponentially self-perpetuating.

State buries the truth

Don't miss this posting by John Ansell.

Annette King - uber politician

Where was deputy Labour leader, Annette King, on the removal of section 59? A staunch supporter.

In this video she, and Deborah Morris Travers, tell us that it is clear police will use discretion and common sense to administer the new law wisely.

Since the law change there has been a large rise in reports of child abuse.

Now, about the Green Paper proposal to make reporting of child abuse mandatory, this is her position:

She said mandatory reporting could lead to vexatious claims, such as neighbours dobbing in each other simply because they don't like each other."I'd also have grave concerns about the ability of CYF to handle a huge influx of what could be seen to be child abuse but may not be."

So she has abandoned her former faith in the police and CYFS to handle changed legislation.

In this 2008 press release she describes John Key as talking "out of both sides of his mouth on the serious issue of child abuse."

Annette King is now using the exact arguments of those who opposed the anti-smacking law, which she pooh-poohed at the time. Her description of the PM should be self-directed.

National's Green Paper on Child Abuse

Apparently, "Ms Bennett told reporters today the discussion paper was different, gusty and controversial."


(Gusty? Very.) Gutsy? Not. Different? I wish. Controversial? Like whether cinnamon or cocoa is better on cappuccino.

It is 'talked up' to disguise.

Just another governmental PR consultative exercise.

Talks predominantly about Leadership and then Asks for Answers. So, so many.

Uses the word 'appropriate' 14 times.
Uses the word 'vision' 21 times.

Green.

Green?

Made from Blue and Yellow.

Foodbanks - build them and they will come

This is a graph depicting food parcel uptake from today's NZ Herald.




First thing I notice is that the usage of foodbanks grew rapidly in the first part of the 2000's when unemployment and reliance on benefits was dropping.



Then I notice that after the introduction of WFF in 2005 usage dropped but by 2008 had resumed earlier levels.

Next the ratio of children to adults has increased from 2.86 children per adult in 2001-02 to 3.86 by 2010-11. One extra child. Which reminds me of a trick low income parents can pull. They simply invent an extra mouth. A client of mine got caught out when she couldn't remember the name of the extra mouth (cat got the mince from that particular parcel.)

But in any event the graph does not include details about whether the applicant is a parent or caregiver. It could be that when the ratio was lower there were more single applicants.

Obviously there is an impact from the recession. But underlying that there is a growing habit. A typical example of how governments or other organisations act to meet 'need' and in the process, create it.

Another wonderful example is the US food stamp program - now ever-so sensitively named the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. A temporary measure which has become part of the wall paper. Foodbanks - build them and they will come.

Countdown decision the right one

The answer is 'no'. I will not sponsor a New Zealand child 50 cents a day so he or she can eat breakfast. I will not because

1/ Taxation already provides Family Tax Credits for that purpose
2/ It is the parent's responsibility to feed their children
3/ More handouts will further reduce that responsibility
4/ Reducing parental responsibility only teaches children they can expect the same in turn
5/ There are conflicting messages about obesity among the lowest quintile and hunger both pushed by leftist outfits who make a living out of their advocacy
6/ I choose to use my money to sponsor a child in Malawi or Mali or wherever World Vision is currently using it to improve farming methods, build community irrigation schemes, etc., to make people self-sufficient rather than dumb and dependent

Good on Countdown for pulling out. I would change my shopping habits to show my appreciation but can't. I already shop there.

Arguing over who is "patronising"

Kathryn Ryan, Radio NZ interviewing UK Secretary for Work and Pensions Ian Duncan Smith.

Smith talks about assessing, monitoring, supporting and sanctioning unemployed or 'disabled' people. Ryan talks about the state hectoring them.

He describes communities which have a culture of worklessness, hopelessness and low life expectancy. Only miles away are aspirational communities with much longer life expectation. He wants the people in poor neighbourhoods to mirror that aspiration.

She calls him patronising and he says, more or less, her attitude is patronising.

Overall I don't hold a huge amount of hope for the UK reforms. Smith is obsessed with simplicity of operation and making work pay. But won't go to the lengths that the US has gone. For instance, where the US (many states) expect work from sole parents when the youngest is one (or even younger), Smith will only apply similar expectations when youngest is 5. Unless temporary means temporary, the attitude to welfare won't change. That was what Clinton understood and built the 1996 reforms around. Until temporary means temporary, people will keep getting themselves into dependent circumstances.

Sweden: not an egalitarian paradise

This is cut and paste from James Bartholomew's blog, originally from the Spectator (no link). Really worth the read.

Sweden is iconic like Marilyn Munroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of socialist paradise where socialism and a big welfare state all work together with being a successful, rich country.

The Left use it as a triumphant example: “See! It works in Sweden! High levels of equality, a big welfare state, socialism and it works!” People think that Sweden proves it is possible for a socialist welfare state to be prosperous, happy and civilised. They think it shows a relatively high levels of tax do not make much difference to economic performance. In fact, for the Left, Sweden demonstrates that all that they dream of is possible. An article in the Guardian of November 16th 2008 (“Where tax goes up to 60pc, and everybody’s happy paying it”) shows the idea is alive and well. The Left can’t quite work out why similar ideas in Britain have never led to quite the same success. But they still look to Sweden as an ideal.

The main trouble with this idea is that when Sweden was as close as it ever has been to being a socialist welfare state, it went bust. For a while, it may have seemed like a great model but it was unsustainable. The Swedish government ran out of money. Why? Because Sweden found, like Britain, that if you pay people to be unemployed, take early retirement or be sick, you get a gradually increasing number of people who claim the relevant benefits. And if you have sky-high taxes people don’t work as hard and/or they cheat and/or they leave.

Then came the financial crisis of the 1990s. Unemployment surged and it reached the point where there were simply too many well-remunerated claimants for too few taxpayers. More than one out of every five people of working age was on one benefit or another. The ideal of Sweden still worshipped by the Left as if nothing had happened didn’t actually work.

But Sweden is different from Marilyn Munroe and Karl Marx. Those icons are dead and unchanging. For Sweden, though, life went on. Going bust could not be the end of the story. The country woke up from the dream and now had to face reality. This is the untold story of Sweden. It went bust and then it made changes.

It toughened up its benefits. The money you could get for unemployment benefit was reduced. So was the length of time for which you can get it. A claimant is required to take menial jobs more quickly than before. This is a process which has applied to virtually all the benefits and which continues to this day.

The Swedes gave up a tradition lasting a generation. They started voting for non-socialist governments. These parties have won the last two elections in a row which has not happened at any time since the Second World War. In response to the pressure of events and the growing success of the non-socialist parties, the Social Democrats have also joined in the movement towards greater realism. It is reminiscent of Labour giving up on state ownership.

There has been a series of measures over the last 20 years and more which have been aimed at making Swedish capitalism freer and more effective. You could call them Thatcherite reforms.

A variety of industries from trains to taxis have been de-regulated. Competition has been allowed in business post. Farm prices which were negotiated are now set by the market. The production of electricity has been opened to competition. Taxation is complicated because there are local as well as national taxes but broadly speaking, the top rate of tax has been brought down from over 80pc to 60pc.

Then Sweden went beyond what Margaret Thatcher introduced in Britain. It went further in introducing choice and competition in healthcare and education. Free schools – that is to say schools started by parents, teachers or private companies which get paid the same amount per pupil as government schools – now account for 10 percent of children being taught in Sweden. And the proportion is still growing. One director of a private school company in Stockholm told me that he expects the proportion easily to reach 30% in the next 15 years.

Supposedly socialist Sweden has gone further than the British coalition government by allowing profit-making private companies to open new schools. Nor are the local authorities allowed to get in their way. The key political thing here is that these companies are not allowed to receive a penny more per pupil than the government-run schools. So when the private schools do better in exams, no one can claim it was because they had more resources. On the contrary, the schools spend less because they are taking out a profit margin of, say, five or six per cent. So they demonstrate that they can offer a better education for lower cost. In any case, it is up to the parents to decide. Nobody has to go to a private school. These schools only get customers who want to be there.

Sweden is also adopting a free market, capitalist approach to healthcare that would give Cameron and Clegg the vapours. If you go to a hospital or clinic there is no cult belief in healthcare being absolutely ‘free at the point of delivery’. You pay some £20 for a first visit. Nearly a third of all primary healthcare – that is general practitioners – is provided by private practices. The figure is 60pc in Stockholm which has led this revolution. Private competition is now set to be opened up in specialist care, too. The idea is that consultants will be taken out of the hospitals where overheads are high and people will increasingly be able to choose private providers of specialist care at no extra cost. The money will follow the patient. Meanwhile some government hospitals are contracted out to private companies to operate.

Beyond all that, there is a complete ignorance in Britain of just how capitalist Sweden is. The steel industry has been privatised as has forestry (remember the furore over this sort of thing in Britain?) Inheritance tax has been abolished. Yes, that’s right, abolished. The country found that too many rich people were leaving so they got rid of a tax which remains in Britain at 40pc.

Mistakes about the nature of Sweden go on and on. People think it is unambiguously an equal and happy society. But while Sweden appears relatively equal in income terms, in terms of wealth it is more unequal than the United States. You can certainly argue that this bare statistic is misleading but then the statistic about income equality could be misleading, too. If the super-rich leave a country, as quite a few did when tax rates were absurdly higher, that would make it appear a more equal society. That is one of a several factors which could exaggerate income equality in Sweden.

Sweden is also probably not such a happy society, either. The incidence of unmarried and lone parenting and divorce is very high. Research from around the world tells us that these things cause unhappiness and alienation for all those concerned – the father and mother as well as the children. Beneath the happy surface of a sunny evening in beautiful Stockholm, is a lot of loneliness. There are said to be more single person households there than in any other city in the world. Certainly there are more such households in Sweden than in any other country in the European Union.
There is also high unemployment among the young and immigrants. This is surely partly because of an effective minimum wage imposed on the various industries by the still-powerful unions. Those who cannot command a good wage, are not allowed to work for a lower one. The consequence is a high unemployment rate among those with lower skills or less experience.

Another illusion is that the welfare state in Sweden is endlessly generous. It isn’t. The main benefits are strictly based on paying insurance premiums. If you have not got a record of those payments, the social assistance you will get (commonly known as ‘income support’ in Britain) is a great deal less and is also difficult to obtain at all. It is administered by local regions out of their own funds and they are reluctant to hand out more than a minimum.

To put it bluntly, Sweden is not a socialist, welfare state paradise of equals because it is not socialist; its welfare state is in some ways tougher than ours; it is not a paradise nor are they as equal as assumed. In fact, take any popularly accepted belief about Sweden and it is probably wrong.

The Swedes are still averting their eyes from two major problems – unemployment caused by the high effective minimum wage and the lone parenting issue. But in general, they have been more realistic and active in dealing with the sort of problems that have become normal in modern democracies. They saw how socialism and over-generous welfare statism were causing potential disasters. And they reacted. The political atmosphere in Sweden is very different from that in Britain. There is a strong desire to reach consensus wherever possible. One almost gets a feeling there, that this is a democracy that is actually grown-up.

Yes, we have some things to learn from Sweden. But it is not how to be a socialist paradise. It is, rather, how to react when the idea of a socialist paradise is shown to be fatally flawed.