30/07/2025
Where Sweden found cross-party consensus, Britain is mired in polarisation. Not just across parties, but within them. Labour is strained between factions and even minor spending cuts became politically impossible, despite the Government’s stonking majority. Starmer’s sacking of MPs who opposed welfare reform illustrates how brittle internal discipline remains; intra-party division has proven more paralysing than inter-party disagreement.
This makes narrative-building nearly impossible. On the other side of the political spectrum, we see parties championing both spending cuts and welfare expansion – Reform support abolishing the two-child benefit cap, while the Tories oppose cuts to pensioner benefits such as the Winter Fuel Allowance. In this populist tug-of-war, any move toward fiscal responsibility can be easily framed as an elitist assault on the vulnerable, rather than a sober effort to secure the future.
Britain today bears an unsettling resemblance to Sweden in the 1980s – a decade before crisis. Sweden waited until the eleventh hour, but when crisis hit, it acted with clarity and institutional strength. We too are waiting, but without the political consensus, institutional scaffolding or the public trust required to act. Unless something extraordinary forces our leaders to reform, the road ahead looks less like Sweden’s recovery, and more like crisis and decline.
✍️ Ayushma Maharjan
Sweden offers a potent historical parallel – both revealing and alarming
