Sweden: the nicest nation?

Poor Sweden, what a week she’s had with her British ally. A car bomb detonated in Stockholm by a Luton living extremist and a rambling extradition/bail/sex/WikiLeaks case which today stumbled into the English High Court, ostensibly for a quarter million pound bail hearing this morning.

All my life Sweden has had to live with burden of Scandinavian goodness and niceness. In common with her neighbours she boasts a state-of-the-art welfare state and a presence in the world that far exceeds her economic and population size.

Beyond the raft of those who seek to rubbish welfare statism with references to alcoholism, depression, and suicide, Sweden is high on the quotient of niceness and goodness. Draw a veil over the reality that she is one of the few European democracies to have suffered the assassination of her leader in the late twentieth century (Olof Palme murdered in 1986).
But there are other dark places in Sweden’s recent life. As the film, the Counterfeit Traitor, spells out, Sweden was deeply involved in shipping vital raw materials to Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

More relevant to today, Sweden also enjoyed a chequered role in the rendition scandal so familiar to us in Britain. In the course of George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, she allowed a number of rendition flights to use Swedish airports and air space.

According to my sources, it is Sweden’s allegedly ‘lax’ relationship with the US that persuades WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s lawyers that they can better resist any attempt by Washington to extradite him by keeping him in the UK, rather than risking his presence in Sweden