In social care circles, Scandinavia, particularly the Swedish bit, is often cited as the holy grail for professional practice. Few would dispute that social care is well funded and well run in the Nordic countries.
So shadow chancellor George Osborne's reported eulogies on Sweden yesterday in front of the left-leaning think-tank Demos came as a pleasant surprise. Or was it a piece of vacuous opportunism during Labour's new ideas gap year?
Certainly, Osborne made all the right noises about creating a fairer society, including that nod to Sweden as he attempted to camp in Labour territory.
And in the Conservatives' document, An Unfair Britain, signed off by Osborne, he berates the levels of poverty in the UK under Labour's watch, even though the Blair-Brown years have seen 600,000 children lifted out of poverty. One wonders how bad things were before 1997 if there is so much still to be done.
So tax-and-spend Sweden is the way to go, eh?
Wrong. Osborne seems to approve of what Sweden has achieved but its methods do not sit easily in the shadow chancellor's economic world.
Instead, he is advocating a free market approach, something the Tories tried when in government for 18 years but anathema to many Swedes. What it didn't do was lift 600,000 children out of poverty; what it didn't do was provide a minimum wage; what it didn't do was provide pensioners with a minimum income. And so we could go on.
Osborne's clanger was to confuse absolute poverty with relative poverty. In drawing attention to the number of people in "deep poverty", as he refers to it, he forgets that, as high-earners continue to receive inflation-busting pay hikes year after year, the income gap can only widen further. Local government workers know what it is like to be offered 2.45% (2.5% in Scotland); City financiers know what it is like to be given bonuses of, oh, think of a telephone number and you won't be far off.
The high earners - and the income gap - have been aided since 1988 when chancellor Nigel Lawson slashed the top income tax band from 60% to 40%, reducing Treasury income at a stroke. Is Osborne suggesting a tax hike? Unlikely, but the money for the more equal society to which he aspires would have to come from somewhere.
Osborne made another howler in An Unfair Britain, upon which the Child Poverty Action Group was eager to seize. In a case of lies, damned lies and Tory statistics, CPAG pointed out that the measure used to calculate the number of people in severe poverty was "dodgy". Even the source of the figure quoted by Osborne, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, admitted it was "highly unreliable".
Already, the wheels are falling off the Osborne bandwagon. It wouldn't even make it through customs at the port of Gothenburg.
Community Care's discussion forum, CareSpace, has a thread debating Osborne's plans. You can join the debate.
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