Polly Toynbee's Lament

Polly Toynbee has spent an entire lifetime shouting that we must all be more like Sweden. That she doesn’t know how Sweden works - more wealth inequality, a more viciously free market economy, than we have - hasn’t dimmed her enthusiasm. But here we get to the heart of her lament, in her words:

Taking the pulse of the world, Ipsos Mori finds us exceptionally mean-minded. Across the world, poverty and inequality come a close second in global public concerns, after inflation. How about the UK? Here we really don’t care much. We rank inflation as our top worry, but poverty and inequality are in a lowly joint fifth place in our concerns.

That’s who we are.

Britain is not Sweden, as we might put it. Or even, Britain is not a socially democratic nation, one that puts those poverty and inequality questions at the top of our worries. Therefore they shouldn’t be the things that politics concentrates upon simply because they’re not the things that we, the people, worry about.

This is a democracy, right?

Polly’s Lament also illustrates Polly’s Tragedy of course. She’s simply spent all of these decades lecturing the wrong nation. Others might have been more receptive to the message - but then equally, those other places which share her worries wouldn’t offer a position as lecturer for her, would they?