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| Harold Wilson, UK Labour leader who was congratulated by Erlander on his immense majority of four seats out of 630 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Tage Erlander during a TV debate in /sweden in 1967, two years before his retirement (Photo credit:Svenska: Tage Erlander Wikipedia) |
My original intention, in
writing this piece, was to draw attention to the positive results, for the left,
of the Swedish coalition experience; but on closer examination, I find that the
political Alliance formed seven years ago by four right-wing parties with the
intention of dislodging the Social Democrats from power also holds a lot of
lessons for our own Left parties.
Let’s take these two aspects
one by one:
First, I was present when, a
few months after Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won the 1964 election by a
majority of four seats out of a total
630 seats in the House of Commons, the party held its annual general conference,
to which came Tage Erlander, the Swedish Prime Minister, to deliver a fraternal
address.
Erlander had been Prime
Minister of Sweden since 1946 --- 18 straight years --- and the first thing he
said was that he wanted to congratulate the British party on their immense
electoral victory. He himself, he said, had never had an overall majority.
Yet, by the use of coalition
governments with various small parties --- at first the Peasants, later the
centre, and still later the Left parties --- he had steered Sweden through its most
prosperous years ever, and --- what is even more to the point --- had in the
process managed to create within Swedish society a consensus for the
left-leaning measures, for creation of the world’s most successful welfare state,
for its unique collaborative system of dividing the wealth between labour and capital, which
transformed the future of his country, and made it at once one of the
most-admired and (in right-wing United States circles) one of the most detested
of nations.
This surely is the complete
answer to the constant nagging about the probable instability likely to follow
the adoption of any form of proportional representation that the right-wing
trot out as their major argument for the anti-democratic status quo.
It was not until just before
he left office in 1969 that Erlander won a slim majority of seats to hand on to
his chosen successor Olof Palme, who was cut down so cruelly by an assassin’s
bullet a few years later.
This brings me on to the second Swedish lesson
that should be of relevance to our NDP, Liberal and Green parties as they plot
how best to overthrow the unrepresentative Harper government.
In 2004, tired of Social
Democratic governments that had ruled Sweden for all but nine of the previous
70 years, the four rightist parties --- the Moderates, the Liberal People’s
Party, the Centre party and the Christian Democrats --- held a number of
meetings aimed at beating the Social Democrats at the 2006 elections.
Their objective was, collectively,
to win a majority of seats and form a
coalition government. They decided to issue common policy statements and to have a joint election
manifesto. (This is one of the hangups of our current anti-Conservative
pretenders to the throne, and one that, it seems to me, they have to get over,
but quickly.
In addition each individual party retained
its own manifesto and policies. The Alliance produced working groups for
six policies, foreign policy, education, the welfare state, employment and
business (traditionally linked in Social
Democratic economic policies), and policing.
This Alliance succeeded in ousting
the Social Democrats at the 2006 election and they are still in power, with
members of each of their four parties holding positions in their Cabinet. They
have done this, even though the Social Democrats are still the leading party in
terms of the popular vote, although they have many fewer voters than was normal
during their governing years. This is
almost an exact replica of the present Canadian House of Commons, except that
Sweden is a country with a democratic system of government compared to Canada’s
sclerotic first-past-the-post system. It is worth emphasizing this: under a
democratic system, a minority of seats cannot be the automatic route to governance.
I am relying on Wikipedia for this
information:
An example
of this policy cooperation was the budget proposal that the Alliance parties
put forward on 2 October 2005. The core proposal was a tax cut of 49 billion
Swedish kronor, which is 1.9% of GDP and 3.3% of the total income of the
public sector in 2005. Each
individual party also proposed its own policies in addition. For example, the
Liberal People's Party want to spend 1bn kronor extra on tertiary education and
the Christian Democrats want to have more benefits and tax deductions for
families.
Can this sort of compromise
really be beyond the powers of our NDP and Liberal parties, if they really want
to replace the Harper government which, according to what they say, is changing Canada fundamentally in a direction that a majority of
Canadians have never given them a mandate to do?
An interesting example of the
spirit of compromise is the effort of the four Alliance partners towards the
Social Democrats’ expressed opposition to extension of nuclear power in Sweden: the Centre Party opposes nuclear power, the Moderates and
Christian Democrats support its continuing operation while the Liberal People's
Party want to build more reactors.
Their joint proposal is that no more reactors are
to be built but the nuclear phase-out law will be repealed and all forms of
energy research will be legal and able to receive state grants (research on nuclear
power is currently forbidden in
Sweden). An Alliance government would also grant any applications to increase
the output of the existing plants, provided that it would be safe to do so. This
has been hailed as an historic step, although the Centre Party and the Liberal People's
Party have not changed their fundamental positions on nuclear power.
It seems to me that if the three Canadian parties
of the centre-left (as they would be called in Sweden) can manage to get together
in this way, a definite possibility exists for the establishment, over the
coming years, of a humanist, gently left-leaning consensus --- from which
Canada is not very far even as we speak --- that
would immensely improve the conditions of life for every Canadian far into the
future.
We have the resources to pull this off: all we
have to decide now is whether we have the will.
This reminds me of one of the most pertinent
political comments I ever heard in my career as a journalist which occurred in London after one of the many
Commonwealth conferences that discussed how to deal with Ian Smith’s rogue
government in Southern Rhodesia as Zimbabwe was then called. The question we reporters put to the
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, as he left for home was, “Should the
Commonwealth intervene militarily in Rhodesia?”
Mr. Lee smiled his enigmatic smile and said, “Whose
who have the will do not have the means; and those who have the means do not
have the will.”
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