Hugo Brundin explains why the social unrest Sweden is experiencing over immigration issues today is made much worse by restrictions on free speech:
Few in Sweden have escaped the circus of its migration politics. During the migration crisis of 2015, we had the somewhat dubious claim to fame of receiving record-breaking numbers of asylum-seekers. A year later, in Spring 2016, the ruling Social Democrats closed the borders. For a while, calling attention to problems in Sweden’s immigrant-dominated suburbs would have you branded an alarmist or a racist. Then in January 2018, the Swedish PM Stefan Löfven said he would consider using the military to curb gang violence in those same suburbs (a comment he later retracted). More recently, the Social Democrats have proposed a ban on all religious schools, clearly aimed at those of the Muslim faith. No party in the Swedish parliament supported such a ban a couple of years ago.
Those concerned with immigration have held Sweden up as a warning of the consequences of open-door migration. But the deeper problem in Sweden is one of public discourse, debate and freedom of speech. You see, Sweden has a consensus culture. The Overton Window is so notoriously narrow that it has been termed the ‘opinion corridor’. And when you’re hurtling down the corridor, unable to see what is around the next corner, much less the one after that, you never know where its twists and turns will take you. Opinions that would have had you vilified a few years ago are now part of the political mainstream, and frankly this can feel downright creepy. Sweden should not be a warning of how not to handle migration – it should be a warning of how not to handle public discussion.
Proposals such as the one to ban religious schools, a deeply intolerant and authoritarian idea, are exactly the sort of thing you get when public opinion changes on a dime, when conflicts have not been properly hashed out in public debate. It used to be said that open-door migration would save the economy and welfare state (rather than put strain on them) and that talk of cultural differences between the Middle East and Sweden was just racist myth-making. Yet now, Islamism is the issue du jour, and the political class is desperate to signal that it is doing something about it, with little thought paid to civil liberties.
