THE SWEDISH ARITHMETIC

There are few spectacles more reliably diverting than a European election in which the result is declared a triumph of democracy by one side and an existential catastrophe by the other, both of them quite certain that the arithmetic of the ballot box has somehow been interfered with by reality itself. Sweden has just furnished us with another of these small masterpieces. The centre-left has edged back into contention after a narrow contest, and the explanation offered in certain quarters is as blunt as a fishmonger’s cleaver: the immigrants did it.

One can almost hear the collective intake of breath among the more refined commentators. To notice that people who arrive in a country under one set of circumstances tend to vote in a particular way is regarded, in polite society, as the rhetorical equivalent of breaking wind at a state banquet. Yet the data, those tiresome little numbers that refuse to take instruction from the higher moral faculties, keep insisting on the point. Voters of foreign background in Sweden lean heavily toward the left; those of Swedish background are more evenly divided. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, observable across much of Western Europe, and it has the awkward quality of being both predictable and politically radioactive.

The argument that follows from this observation is simplicity itself, which is why it offends. If a large and growing portion of the electorate consistently prefers one political family, then the other political family faces a mathematical problem that no amount of better messaging or more photogenic candidates can solve. The left’s strategy, according to this view, is the open frontier: welcome the arrivals, naturalise them in due course, and collect the resulting votes with the serene confidence of a man who has just discovered that the roulette wheel is fixed in his favour. The right’s counter-strategy, if it wishes to remain in the game rather than become a permanent minority interest, is said to be “remigration” — a word that manages to sound both bureaucratic and faintly medieval, as though the Interior Ministry had briefly consulted the chronicles of the Reconquista.

Fire, as the original notice put it with admirable economy, is fought with fire. One may quarrel with the metaphor. Fire, after all, is an equal-opportunity consumer of furniture, and the political arsonist often ends up standing in the same ashes as his intended victim. Still, the underlying logic has a certain grim clarity. If demographic change is treated as destiny by one side, the other side can hardly be expected to treat it as an immutable force of nature. To do so would be to accept permanent exclusion from power with the stoicism of a Stoic who has misplaced his copy of Epictetus and is making do with a pamphlet from the local Green Party.

What elevates the whole business from mere arithmetic into high comedy is the solemn pretence that none of this is happening. Official discourse prefers to speak of enrichment, diversity, and the moral imperative of openness, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the electoral consequences of those virtues once they have been translated into citizenship papers. It is rather like a host who invites half the neighbourhood to dinner and then expresses mild surprise that the conversation has turned against the previous seating plan. The guests, for their part, are under no obligation to vote for the host’s preferred party simply because the canapés were adequate. Loyalty is not a condition of entry, and gratitude is not a political programme.

The right, meanwhile, finds itself in the unenviable position of having discovered the problem rather late in the evening, after the furniture has already been rearranged. Its more voluble spokesmen now talk of remigration with the sudden enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered where he left the fire extinguisher. Whether such a policy is practicable, desirable, or even coherent is a separate question; the fact that it is being proposed at all tells us something about the scale of the anxiety. Permanent minority status is a prospect that concentrates the mind wonderfully, even among politicians whose usual talents run more to slogan than to strategy.

One need not endorse the remedy to acknowledge the diagnosis. Societies that import large numbers of people from cultural and political traditions markedly different from their own should not be astonished when those people bring their preferences with them. To pretend otherwise is to treat the electorate as a blank slate upon which the host nation may write whatever values it prefers — an assumption that sits oddly with the simultaneous insistence that every culture is of equal worth and must be celebrated rather than assimilated. The contradiction is so glaring that only a professional intellectual could fail to notice it, and even then only with considerable effort.

Sweden’s narrow result is therefore less a verdict on any particular policy than a reminder of an older truth: politics is downstream of demography, and demography is downstream of decisions that were sold at the time as acts of pure benevolence. The left has played the longer game with some skill. The right is now being invited, by its own more impatient voices, to play a shorter and sharper one. Whether either side will ultimately thank the immigrants for the opportunity remains to be seen. The immigrants themselves, one suspects, will continue to vote according to their own lights, which is, after all, what free citizens are supposed to do. 

The rest of us are left with the spectacle of two political camps arguing over the consequences of a transformation that both of them, in different ways, helped to create — and doing so with all the grace of men who have just realised that the house they are fighting over no longer belongs exclusively to either of them. It is, as the original note observed with devastating understatement, as simple as that. The difficulty, of course, is that simplicity has never been democracy’s strongest suit.

BIT BY BIT, THE SWITCH FLIPS ...

Picture the scene, dear reader. Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit bunker that smells of institutional coffee and quiet despair, a group of extremely serious people in extremely expensive suits are nodding along to a PowerPoint about “streamlining identity verification.” One of them is Lisa Nandy, Culture Secretary at the time, looking for all the world like she’s just discovered the secret to happiness: forcing every adult in the country to exist as a neat little data packet that the state can ping whenever it feels insecure. She went on the telly and said it with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been on the wrong end of a government algorithm. All British adults will have a digital ID by the end of Parliament. 

Not a card you have to wave about like a Soviet internal passport, she insisted. Nothing so vulgar. Just a lovely digital thing on your phone that you’ll only really need to prove you have the right to work. It’s for your protection, you see. Against illegal workers. Against fraud. Against the terrifying spectre of people existing without the state’s prior approval. How thoughtful. How modern. How very, very fucking convenient for the people who will eventually own the off-switch.

The original objection still stands, and it stands taller than ever. Many people might want the sort of UN-flavoured, centralised data framework the government was so keen on building. Some will think it’s really convenient. They don’t mind the government being able to watch what they spend their money on, who pays them, where they go on holiday, what vaccines they take each year, how well they did in school and what their political opinions look like online. Some will even clap like seals at the idea that international Digital ID will magically stop illegal migration and fraud and make the streets safer. Fair enough. People clap for all sorts of things. Some people clap for reality television.

The problem—the screaming, copper-bottomed, Black Mirror-shaped problem—is that no one was asked to vote for it. Digital ID is not a card or a wallet on your phone. It is an entire YOU file, accessible by authorities, that will eventually grant you permissions depending on your behaviour. That framework was already being sketched in. The permissions logic is baked into the concept from the start. Once the infrastructure exists, the temptation to expand its uses is not a bug. It is the entire operating system of power.

If this was so marvellous, so obviously better for everyone, why didn’t the government spell out exactly what it was, what it would do, and—crucially—what it could do in five years, ten years, when the political weather has shifted and the same machinery is being run by people who make today’s lot look like soft liberals? Why didn’t the parties put it in their manifestos in plain English? Why the soft-focus language about convenience and “gateway to government services” while Nandy reassured everyone it would never, ever be used to restrict access to the NHS or pensions? Because they knew. They knew the majority would look at the full prospectus and say, in no undertrain terms, sod off. And that is not an acceptable answer in a country that still pretends to run on consent.

Bit by bit the control changes. First it’s just for right to work. Then it’s the easiest way to access benefits. Then it’s the preferred method for banking, travel, healthcare records, age verification, everything. Suddenly not having the digital equivalent of a gold star means life becomes a series of minor, grinding humiliations. You are not banned. You are simply… less convenient. Less trusted. Less permitted. The government does not need jackboots when it has an app that can quietly throttle your existence.

This was never just about Lisa Nandy, though she was a particularly enthusiastic salesperson for the product. It was the entire apparatus—ministers, civil servants, the think-tank circuit, the same revolving door of consultants and global forums that treat the population as a management problem rather than a collection of free adults. A cartel of the well-connected, convinced that the only thing standing between civilisation and chaos is more data, more verification, more central visibility. They talk about “trust frameworks” and “useful, inclusive, trusted” systems while building the architecture for something that looks, smells and walks like soft authoritarianism with a user-friendly interface.

Orwell didn’t warn us about the jackboot first. He warned us about the language that makes the jackboot feel like common sense. “Protect Britons.” “Tackle illegal working.” “Cut bureaucracy.” “Digital age.” Every phrase is a little anaesthetic. By the time you notice the needle, the drip is already running. The plans were eventually watered down under pressure, then publicly scrapped when the political weather changed. Three million people signed a petition. Public opposition was loud enough that even a government with a large majority had to retreat. That should be the end of the story. It never is. The infrastructure thinking remains. The appetite remains. The belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own lives without a digital chaperone remains. 

And the next time the same idea is wheeled out—perhaps under a different name, with slightly softer edges and a new set of smiling ministers—it will arrive wearing the same patient smile Nandy wore while explaining that this was all for our own good. The only rational response to that smile is to treat it the way you treat a man offering you a free tracking collar “for your safety.” You smile back. You say "no". And you remember that the people building the systems of control are never the ones who will live under the worst version of them. This is point where "no" simply has to become "fuck off". 

They will have exemptions. They will have workarounds. They will have the power to redefine what 'behaviour' looks like when it becomes inconvenient. We were not asked. That remains the point. Everything else is just the long, darkly comic process of watching a political class try to sell the public their own subordination as an upgrade.

Time for that revolution, methinks.

9/11 @ 25: THE DAY THE ORDINARY ENDED

The towers fell on a Tuesday, which is the sort of day that usually reserves its dramas for committee meetings and the slow death of office plants. Twenty-five years on, one is still obliged to notice that the sky was the colour of a particularly smug postcard, the sort that arrives from a friend who has forgotten you exist until the photograph proves otherwise. Then the first aircraft arrived, and the postcard tore itself in half.

I was not there, of course, most of us were not, I was at home from University. Distance is the modern condition, and television made sure of it. We watched the second impact live, which is a phrase that still sits in the mouth like a bad olive. Live. As if death had decided to keep office hours. The commentary teams, those professional noticers of the obvious, fell briefly silent, which is the nearest television ever comes to dignity. Then they recovered, as they always do, and began the long process of turning horror into narrative, narrative into analysis, and analysis into the sort of solemn waffle that eventually requires a theme tune.

What remains, a quarter-century later, is not so much the image of the buildings collapsing—though that has been burnt into the collective retina with the efficiency of a branding iron—as the sudden discovery that the ordinary was not protected by its ordinariness. People went to work. They carried coffee. They argued about nothing in particular in elevators that would shortly cease to exist. The banality was the point. Evil, when it bothers to show up, rarely bothers with originality. It prefers the familiar street, the familiar skyline, the familiar assumption that today will resemble yesterday closely enough to allow for lunch plans.

The aftermath was a masterclass in competitive solemnity. Flags proliferated with the enthusiasm of a rash. Politicians discovered their inner Churchill, or at any rate their inner Churchill impersonator, and the language of resolution thickened like gravy left too long on the stove. We were assured that the world had changed forever, which is the sort of claim that looks impressive until one notices that the same people making it continued to book tables at the same restaurants and complain about the same traffic. Forever is a long time, and most of us are not built for it. We are built for the next news cycle, the next scandal, the next opportunity to feel briefly important by association with catastrophe.

There was, inevitably, the war. Or rather the wars, plural, which multiplied with the generosity of a bad idea that has found funding. One could argue about the wisdom of any particular response, and many did, at great and largely pointless length. What was harder to argue with was the spectacle of a civilisation that had spent decades congratulating itself on its subtlety suddenly discovering that subtlety is of limited use when the other party has decided that aeroplanes make excellent missiles. The satire wrote itself, which is always a bad sign. When reality starts producing its own punchlines, the professional satirist is left looking for alternative employment, preferably something involving less irony and more gardening.

Memory, meanwhile, has done what memory always does: it has edited. The sharp edges have been smoothed by repetition until the event resembles a particularly grim public holiday, complete with obligatory moments of silence and the soft focus of retrospect. Young people who were not alive at the time now study it as history, which means they study it with the same mixture of duty and mild boredom that earlier generations brought to the Treaty of Versailles. The photographs remain, of course—those terrible, beautiful photographs in which the light is perfect and the smoke is photogenic and the falling bodies are reduced to abstract marks against the blue. Art has always known how to make suffering look interesting. That is one of its less attractive talents.

And yet the lament persists, dry as it may sound. One does not need to inflate the occasion with purple prose to notice that something was taken that day which has not been returned. Not innocence—innocence is a commodity that was already in short supply—but a certain unexamined confidence that the skyline was permanent, that the morning commute was a private affair between a person and their destination, that the ordinary day could be trusted to remain ordinary. That confidence has been replaced by a low-grade vigilance, the sort that checks the exits in restaurants without quite admitting it is doing so. It is not heroic. It is merely accurate.

Twenty-five years is long enough for the politicians who spoke of resolve to have been replaced by other politicians who speak of other resolves. It is long enough for the children who watched the towers fall on classroom televisions to have children of their own, who will one day be shown the same footage and asked to feel something appropriate. Feeling appropriate is a skill that can be taught, rather like table manners. Whether it is the same as understanding is another question, and one that the anniversary industry is not notably eager to answer. The dead remain dead. That is the one fact that has resisted all attempts at narrative improvement. Their names are read aloud each year with the careful neutrality of a railway timetable, and then the living go back to their living. There is no satisfactory conclusion available, which is perhaps why the occasion continues to attract the attentions of those of us who make a living from unsatisfactory conclusions. 

The towers are gone. The sky is still the same colour on a clear September morning. The difference is that we now look at it with a certain suspicion, as if it might be planning something. That suspicion is the real memorial, and it requires no plaque. It is carried, uncomfortably, in the ordinary act of looking up.