Chapter 10: Countryside PoliticsSea cruise to Stockholm; Stockholm as a rich city region; Voting in Stockholm City 1982-88; Town and Country; Company towns in Södertälje and Uppsala; Stockholm and Boston; Difficulty of translating Stockholm into British terms; The other side of the tracks; People’s aspirations in Stockholm, Boston and England; Gardeners and Fishermen; Land shortage in England a humbug; National Trust as aristocratic device; Theft of the English countryside.
But now it is time for us to leave the Island of Gotland. We will travel in a more leisurely fashion. By catamaran across the Baltic to Nynäshamn a short drive south of Stockholm. In a few hours we are back in Stockholm. The Big City. A cosmopolitan city at the heart of a rich city region, one that is among the richest and wealthiest to be found anywhere on the planet. What do elections mean here in Stockholm? What is Representative Democracy Stockholm style?The City of Stockholm has fifteen times as many representatives in the Swedish National Parliament as the Island of Gotland. Getting on for half a million voting citizens determine which of the national parties they will come from. Here are the percentages.
Figure 4: % of the vote in Stockholm City 1982-1988 Election M C Fp S Vpk Mp Kds 1982 33.7 7.3 5.9 39.4 10.1 2.2 1.0 1985 30.2 2.4 15.8 38.0 9.6 1.7 1.3 1988 27.9 4.2 14.6 34.2 10.4 6.9 1.8 And here are the allocation of parliamentary seats.
Only two percent of the votes wasted here in 1988 compared to the 34% wasted in Gotland where only the Labour Party (S) and the Farmers Party (C) votes yielded any representation in the Swedish Parliament. Not so easy to buy yourself a rotten borough? That remains to be seen. Let us look first at the votes cast so we can define the scope of the problem.
Figure 5: Seats allocated to Stockholm City by Party 1982-1988 M C Fp S Vpk Mp Kds Total 1982 11 2 2 12 4 - - 31 1985 9 1 5 11 3 - - 29 1988 8 1 5 10 4 2 - 30 Stockholm Stad, like Glasgow Central or Inner London, sits in the midst of a suburban commuter hinterland. This hinterland is the home of the middle class dream. In Stockholm this can be conveniently encompassed within the Stockholmlän constituency of Stockholm County. Stockholm County reaches out as far as Södertälje in the west and to Uppsala in the north, both sizable company towns of a hundred and fifty thousand people dominated by a handful of large ‘job givers such as Saab-Scania in Södertälje and Pharmacia and ‘Diploma Mills incorporating MegaResearch Inc’, otherwise known as Uppsala University in Uppsala. It meets the Gotland catamaran at Nynäshamn in the south.
Figure 6: Votes cast in Stockholm in 1988 in thousands of votes M C Fp S Vpk Mp Kds Total Sthlm City 117 18 61 144 44 29 8 421 Sthlm County 150 35 88 195 35 33 10 546 Greater Sthlm 267 53 149 339 79 62 18 967 Together the Stockholm Stad and Stockholmlän constituencies can be regarded for our purposes as defining the Stockholm City Region, where everywhere is no more than an hour’s drive from every other where, and where the commuter train services will take you anywhere you wish to go in about the same time - just providing that somewhere is into the city centre or out again. To go east from the city centre, you take a boat and head for the Finnish coast except in the winter when a pair of skis can often be more helpful.
For Americans, it is perhaps easiest to think of the Stockholm City Region in terms of the Boston City Region. Stockholm to Sweden is similar to Boston to New England with both of them containing within their regional limits the same number of families as were to be found in the thirteen colonies back at the time of independence. Stockholmers go to Dalarna just as Bostonians go to Vermont. And it is perhaps not stretching the comparisons too far to say that Stockholmers go to London and the Canary Islands the way Bostonians go to New York and Florida. And they do all these things for much the same reasons, at much the same price, and at much the same pace.
For the British, the comparisons do not translate so well. Living in Stockholm or Boston you aspire to an apartment in the town and a summer house in the country. You mess around in boats in the summer and fall about on skis in the winter. And surprisingly, something like half of the people in Stockholm regard this aspiration as one they can expect to live out at some time during their lifetime and not the stuff of dreams and soap operas. There is something of the same feel around the suburbs of the Boston City Region though the fantasy is likely to be considerably greater than the fact. That, of course, leaves the other half over there on the other side of the tracks.
In Great Britain, the aspiring part of the population seems seldom to exist. Everybody lives on the other side of the tracks except the few beautiful people and aspirations float in the direction of moving further from the tracks and trading up to a better home.
Admittedly seven million Brits go fishing and most of them like to be beside the seaside, but for a traditional maritime people living in the Land of Rivers there is no longer the type of Light and Lakes worship that is characteristic of the Peoples of the Baltic Lakes now quietly domiciled in the Stockholm City Region.
And it would be quite wrong to think that the love of the country is not there. It most certainly is. J.B.Priestley in his English Journey picked up on this when he had this to say.
There is this to be said
about the English people
Give them even a foot or two of earth
and they will grow flowers in it
they do not willingly let go of the country
as the foreign people do
once they have settled in a town
they are all gardeners
perhaps country gentlemen
at heart
Abroad the town
even though it is really only
a small village
nearly always starts abruptly
brutally
at once cutting itself off
from the country
and putting on the dusty and flowerless
look of the city
Here we take leave of the country
reluctantly
and with infinite gradations
from the glory of rosebeds
and the full parade of hollyhocks
to the last outposts
among the grimy privet and grass
where perhaps a sooty aster
still lingers.Well that was written some fifty years ago and there has been some changing of appearances as villages have been uglified everywhere and committees have put out their concrete flower pots as the last memorial to the departing of city pride.
But it captures both the spirit of the thing and the crushing of that spirit by the theft of the British countryside by sheep and surpluses, tax havens posing as tree planters and selfish aristocratic interests posing as countryside socialists holding ever increasing tracts of fine countryside out of reach of the yeoman farmer and the honest summer citizen from the towns under a supercilious veneer of piety and patriotism. In a word, the British land shortage is a humbug.
Under it all their aspirations are likely to rise to and perhaps surpass those of the Stockholmer and the Bostonian. They too want to live in both the country and the town. They never asked to be day trippers in their own country. Nor to be parked each night in the next room to the car in a dormitory suburban apology for the bustle and the excitement that is the idea of the town.
Perhaps the ladies once thought they would like it this way. But her unhappiness as she shares her nice clean home with her car, her cares and her kids tell their own story. The women can no more live without the men than the men can live meaningfully without the women. And these little suburban boxes breed mice and not men. Mice, misery and mistresses.
The young ones at least are beginning to turn their backs on the middle class dream. But to what can they turn? The petit bourgeois wears a different mask in each generation. Alienation takes on different forms. The enemies of liberty cloak themselves with different coloured garments. The enlightenment of education becomes the imprisonment of schooling. The dignity of vocation is transformed into the slavery of wages. The meek inherit the impotence of their fathers. The old women kill off the old men. And the troubadours sleep rough in the subways.
But elections will change all this. In England they will give the people back their land. In Sweden the young will inherit their land of light and lakes while they still have the energy and the vision to hold dominion over it. In America the good will destroy the law and the producer will be honoured while the looter and the moocher is cast down. Representative Democracy will achieve all this. So the theory goes.