lime , 4 hours ago

how long have you got?

• in the 90s, we started privatising a shitload of institutions which has started coming back to bite us now, most notably when the govt said “we will build a nuclear power plant” and the now private energy authority Vattenfall said “no”.
• we fucked our schools up completely by having municipalities foot the bills for local schools, which of course means that schools are now worse in poorer communities. also we structured it so each child is worth a set amount of tax money to the school and opened the door to privately funded schools, meaning tax kronor are now disappearing into foreign-owned private schools such as Engelska Skolan. Literacy and math proficiency levels have been falling for 15 years as a result.
• we seem to have made it our national sport to add layers of bureaucracy to jobs, with one study finding that swedish doctors spend more than 70% of their time doing paperwork. the system is leaking money as a result.
• our system of “expertmyndigheter”, governmental organizations of non-elected experts on particular subjects meant to advise the elected, seem to be increasingly ignored in favor of populism.
• during the big European migrant wave of the 10s, we failed to come up with a coherent integration plan and people instead moved to where others from their region already lived, leading to insulated communities that the press has called “parallel societies” because they have no need to integrate.
• these neighborhoods have been affected by all of the above, which have made them poorer, less literate, and detached from the society around them, which has in turn made them into prime recruitment material for criminal gangs. children as young as 9 have been arrested for drug running, and 13-year-olds have been caught looking to do hits advertised through social media.
• our current right-wing government wants to be seen as “tough on crime”, and so as violent crime has spiked, so has arrests. this means our prison population has skyrocketed, and the prisons are also recruiting grounds for gangs.
• children, of course, go to “special youth homes” (SIS) or “closed youth care” (SVU) instead of prison, but it turns out those places were badly run even before this whole mess and are not only led by unqualified personnel, but are also used for recruiting by gangs.

tr;dr: we sowed 30 years ago, and we are currently reaping.