Dr Will Jones: Sweden Celebrates Migrant Crackdown Success as Asylum Seeker Numbers Hit 40-Year Low

The number of migrants granted asylum in Sweden dropped to the lowest level in 40 years in 2024 after a years-long crackdown on immigration under a succession of Governments. The Mail has the story.

Sweden stunned the world by taking in nearly 163,000 asylum seekers during the 2015 migrant crisis – the highest number per capita of any EU country.

Brendan O'Neill: Sweden and the lethal complacency of the elites

Are we allowed to talk about Sweden yet? Now that the Swedish army is being asked to help cops with a surge in gangland killings, can we ask if perhaps there is something rotten in the state of Sweden? For years the complacent technocracies of America and Europe said Sweden was fine. Only Trumpists and troublemakers would say otherwise. Now, following the PM’s announcement that he’s asking the army to use everything from its knowledge on ‘explosives’ to ‘helicopter logistics’ to help tackle an epidemic of gang crime, maybe these people will be roused from their Scandi-naïveté.

Benjamin Macintyre: Sweden steals Ukraine's show

Last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius was supposed to be about Ukraine’s needs and whether they would be met. Zelenskiy wanted guarantees for future NATO membership and the military alliance wanted to present a united front to Putin.

In a surprise twist, the real winner of the summit was Sweden.

Brendan O'Neill: The empire of hurt feelings

Islamic countries are trying to force the West to respect Muslims’ ‘feelings’. We must resist this therapeutic imperialism.

Where is the solidarity with Sweden? The foreign embassies of our democratic ally are under attack. The walls of its embassy in Baghdad were breached by hundreds of angry protesters last week. Other Muslim nations issued stinging rebukes against the Swedes. Morocco summoned Sweden’s representative for a dressing-down. Jordan reprimanded the Swedish ambassador over what it called Sweden’s ‘racist’ behaviour. Iran said it will not send an ambassador to Sweden. And Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed Sweden’s ‘arrogance’, saying this wicked nation promotes ‘Islamophobia’ under the guise of ‘freedom of thought’ (not content with destroying freedom of thought in his own country, now he wants to undermine it in Sweden, too).

Point of Order: Co-governance isn’t mentioned in latest Three Waters statement......

.....but that doesn’t mean it has been flushed down the Beehive drain

Within 15 minutes of the Government emailing its overhauled water-service reforms to Point of Order, another email arrived, this time from National’s local government spokesman, Simon Watts. Hard on the heels of that came emails from the Act Party and the Taxpayers’ Union.

The Opposition parties and the Taxpayers’ Union, you won’t be surprised to learn, expressed their objections to the Government’s revised plans (but they won’t have winkled out all the flaws after a quick read of what was announced).

Murray Sherwin: Re-evaluating Sweden's Covid policy "experiment"

In early 2020, as the world was becoming alarmed about the spread of Covid-19, the response in one country stood out as an internationally newsworthy departure from the norm. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist, was regularly in front of TV cameras, arguing that widespread mandated lockdowns were not likely to prove beneficial in the longer term and might, in fact, prove damaging in important respects. He advocated an approach relying more on individual responsibility and a clear focus on risk and effective risk mitigation in an environment in which Covid was expected to eventually become endemic.

Bob Jones: Years of shame

Periodically, following an accident, we read of someone falling into a coma then coming out of it a year or so later. Imagine such a Rip Van Winkle situation now with someone who say fell into a coma in mid 2020 and waking today.

When this hypothetical R.V.W lost consciousness the nation was under a Stalinist totalitarian control with daily Great Leader TV broadcasts, infantile nonsense about the team of 5 million, a cringing fat woman ringing her hands on television urging us to be kind, all socialising, working (unless a critical service), public gatherings, sport playing and watching, swimming, restaurant patronising, etc, etc, etc, forbidden; in total an unbelievable Orwellian situation enforced on a compliant public at a level not even attained in war-time.

Denis Hall: The "Far" Right - or the "Rabid" Left?

You choose.

Right - as in okay! Is it okay to say ‘right’ now - or will they make that a swear word?

And I’m not going to hold back today.

As you read this - remember - that it wasn’t me who invoked Mussolini or the Fascists - it was the leftist New Zealand and Global News Media that did that - and I’m just responding.

Ask yourself! New Aotearoa’s Media! Are they crazy - or cunning and deceptive like the rats we think they are - jumping into the Government’s pocket to ensure their position of power inside the Government in our coming totalitarian future?

Bob Jones: Shameless gloating

Sorry to rub it in (I’m not really) but my prediction on this blog in early 2020 that “when it’s all done and dusted, Sweden’s non-lockdown approach to covid will have proved to be the correct one”.

Apart from the fact that all of Europe has now adopted it, here’s the actual data recently released by the World Health Organisation for 2020-21.

Sir Bob Jones: Farewell

Until the advent of the virus over the previous six decades I’d spent at least half my life abroad. I went and sometimes lived for times virtually everywhere which taught me that people are basically the same, thus I lost any sense of nationalism.

Then suddenly I found myself compelled to stay here for 3 years, thanks to the hermit kingdom absurdity. I was appalled by New Zealanders meek passivity to this and most of all to the ludicrous but now dead Jacindamania madness.

Sir Bob Jones: Sanity dawns

On this site in March, 2020 when the coronavirus panic began, I predicted that when it’s all done and dusted, Sweden’s “live with it” approach will have proven the correct path to adopt. It’s not yet totally “done and dusted” globally but the developed world will reach that stage sometime this year.

Meanwhile, increasingly liberal societies have woken to the realities and are adopting the Swedish model, mindful that with widespread vaccinations, restraints are now irrational.

Of course, vaccinations regardless, there are still freakishly rare fatality exceptions, but closing down society at a massive social and economic cost, the consequences of which will be a huge economic upheaval ahead, to prevent “freakish” contingencies, is simply insanity.

Johan Anderberg: How Sweden swerved Covid disaster

A hundred years ago, in New York City, 20,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in protest against one of the greatest public health policy experiments in history. One of them was wearing a sign featuring an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” beside the slogan, “Wine was served.” There were posters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Another read: “Tyranny in the name of righteousness is the worst of all tyrannies.”

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Dr Steven Phillips: The pandemic winner - will It be Sweden or New Zealand?

The world has never conducted a human-centered natural experiment of a biological threat of this scope before. Three billion people in over 80 countries (including UK, France, and most U.S. states, among many others) are in some form of lockdown with over 185 countries having reported three million-plus Covid-19 cases.

Yet in countries such as Sweden, elementary schools, businesses, and restaurants are open, and in Belarus, the president is seen at hockey games and declares business-as-usual.

To paraphrase Deng Xiaoping’s formulation from the 1980s, we see the spread of “one virus and at least two systems.”

Governments everywhere are facing a stark “jobs vs. deaths” Hobbesian choice.

Daniel Mitchell: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Sweden

I’m in Sweden today, where I just spoke before Timbro (a prominent classical liberal think tank) about the US elections and the implications for public policy.

My main message was pessimism since neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton support genuine entitlement reform.

Daniel Mitchell from the Cato Institute: Sweden - big government and the welfare state

Sweden punches way above its weight in debates about economic policy. Leftists all over the world (most recently, Bernie Sanders) say the Nordic nation is an example that proves a big welfare state can exist in a rich nation. And since various data sources (such as the IMF’s huge database) show that Sweden is relatively prosperous and also that there’s an onerous fiscal burden of government, this argument is somewhat plausible.

A few folks on the left sometimes even imply that Sweden is a relatively prosperous nation because it has a large public sector. Though the people who make this assertion never bother to provide any data or evidence.

Kevin Donnelly: We can learn from Finland and Sweden

What is the most effective way to raise education standards? Given Julia Gillard's argument that we need to "take a giant leap forward in education" and her promise, most recently reiterated in a letter in News Limited tabloids on Sunday, to put Australia among the top five schooling systems by 2025, the question is more than academic.