Does the conservative coalition government in power in Stockholm since September 2006 allow us to glimpse what policy emanating from Westminster after our next general election might feel like? The Tories think and hope so. They have been hot-footing it to Sweden lately and the Swedish prime minister, the leader of the Moderates Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has been coming to London to have dinner at maison Cameron.
At first glance, the Tory-Swedish connection is incongruous. Public spending sits above 50% of GDP and the "bourgeois alliance" (its own description) has shown no appetite for cutting it. Taxes have been cut, leaving average Swedes about £80 a month better off after the latest round of reductions in income tax in January. But Swedish public finances are in remarkably fine fettle, thanks (ministers admit) to the housekeeping of the Social Democrat government under Goran Persson, who lost the last election more because of the public's boredom and dislike of his personality than enthusiasm for the alternative. Tory visitors to Sweden will note, too, that the polls have been fairly consistently showing the Social Democrats ahead by a comfortable margin.
None the less they are intrigued by two areas where the Moderate-led coalition has departed from its predecessors' script. One is squeezing recipients of unemployment and incapacity benefit, to push up the numbers in work and the second is radical contracting for public services - Sweden has done something that would be wildly controversial here and contracted out accident and emergency hospitals.
Little noticed in the UK - and not yet an explicit objective of Tory policy - the Swedish right has succeeded in cutting trade union membership. By reducing unemployment benefits, the government has made union membership less attractive (because unions are major providers of unemployment insurance schemes). But a result could be (so one of the trade union confederations warns) more wildcat strikes as the established unions lose control and cannot deliver on Sweden's famed national pay bargains.
Private companies
What has attracted attention is Swedish involvement of private companies in providing schools. Under the conservative government in power in the early 1990s, the Swedes established "free" schools - a scheme under which parents could contract with (non-) profit school providers at the government's expense. About one in 10 Swedish children of school age now attend such schools. The Tories are keen, seeing this as a way of realising their ambition of establishing vouchers in England. Not to be bested, Labour ministers have invited the Swedish company Kunskapskola to prospect for secondary academies, albeit on a non-profit basis.
The Swedish healthcare company Capio is already contracting for treatment centres in England. At home, Reinfeldt's wife - who is a local elected official in her own right - has been pushing to expand use of contractors in health and social care in the greater Stockholm area. Tory visitors have also been visiting Stockholm city council, controlled by the conservatives, which has expanded private provision of care homes for the elderly.
Northern conservatives
But the "blueness" of these northern conservatives should not be exaggerated. The right of centre thinktank Timbro is deeply disappointed and cannot fathom why the Reinfeldt government has not garnered more support for its tax cuts. Ministers in the government play down their radicalism. The minister for employment Sven Otto Littorin says he has no wish to follow even New Labour in contracting out job finding to the private sector. The state employment agency does a perfectly fine job, he says and he welcomes moves by some of the unions to brigade together in a social enterprise that will help long-term unemployed people find places in the labour market.
In education, the Reinfeldt government is much less keen than the Cameron Tories on pursuing parental choice. It has turned its attention to the UK's 1990s agenda for schools and wants to reform the curriculum and teacher education, in order to boost the quality of classroom teaching in state schools. If that means wresting controls from Sweden's powerful county councils, so be it.
