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Sweden is to the 21st-century right what the Soviet Union was to the 20th-century left. Conservatives have transformed it into a Tory Disneyland where every dream comes true. On the shores of the Baltic lies a country that has no need to curtail civil liberties and wreck the economy to curb Covid-19. I have a dream, a fantasy, sang Abba. To help me through reality. For much of the right, that fantasy is called Sweden.

Let the leader of the Conservative backbenchers stand for the Tory press and innumerable ideologues inside and outside Westminster. Sir Graham Brady ruined a perfectly good argument that parliament must have the power to scrutinise Johnsons emergency decrees by announcing that there was no emergency. We could look to a country that merely had a ban on gatherings of more than 50, restrictions on visiting care homes, a shift to table-only service in bars and see that Sweden today is in a better place than the United Kingdom. Or as the Sun explained on Thursday as Boris Johnson met Anders Tegnell, the Swedish public health mastermind, a do-little strategy has spared Sweden a second wave of Covid-19 infections.

Its not true that Sweden offers an escape from the public health catastrophe. I only wish it did. But, and this is when conservative commentators, politicians and conspiracy theorists look away, Sweden offers an escape from the social catastrophe now engulfing us.

You never hear the Telegraph or the Mail say that we need Swedish levels of sickness benefit to ensure that carriers stay at home and quarantine. Or Swedish levels of housing benefit to ensure that they arent evicted from those same homes. The knights of the suburbs do not insist that the hundreds of thousands who will be thrown on the dole in the coming months need Swedish levels of unemployment benefit and an interventionist Scandinavian state to retrain them.

Covid-19 is exposing the lack of social solidarity in Britain. For a moment when the virus hit we stood together. We locked down voluntarily and applauded the NHS. Millions of people, and not only Conservative voters, were prepared to overlook the dismal truth that we had a comedy prime minister who was tragically unequipped to lead a country in a crisis. The symbolic moment of disintegration historians will remember was Johnsons refusal to sack Dominic Cummings when he broke the rules everyone else believed they had a patriotic duty to obey. But all around us there have been hundreds of thousands of quiet disintegrations as lives were lost and families were forced to beg at food banks. Soon, millions of lives will disintegrate as government support is slashed.

You have to be over 40 to understand the peculiar evil of mass unemployment. I was one of the unemployed of the Thatcher years and learned that behind the jargon about social capital and scarring is a concept that is easier to grasp: your confidence is shot to pieces. The longer you are out of work, the more insecure you become and the harder it becomes for you to convince anyone to employ you. A job can move faster than the comfortable imagine possible from something you cant get to something you cant do. Benefits are a commitment to social solidarity because they are not just protections against hunger, homelessness and want, but because they reflect a societys willingness to work with you as you struggle to hold yourself together.

Take two people: one living in Malm, the other in Manchester. When a Swede loses his or her job they are entitled to up to 80% of their previous salary for the first 200 days of inactivity up to 910 krona (78) a day for the first 100 days dropping to 70% (to a maximum of 760 krona a day) for the next 100 days. Danes who are members of unemployment insurance funds can claim up to 90%. As importantly, Sweden is the best place in the world to lose your job because employers pay a levy to job security councils whose coaches seek you out and match your skills and ambitions with the market.

Rishi Sunak says there is no point in subsidising many of the pre-Covid-19 jobs in the high street and hospitality because they are not coming back. But, like the Tories of the 1980s, he is not offering retraining to prepare the unemployed for the jobs of the future. Once again, unemployment is the responsibility of the unemployed, even though its a stretch to see how they are responsible for a virus jumping species in Wuhan.

As for keeping 80% or indeed 90% of their income, the Resolution Foundation pointed out that under Sunaks plans a single adult homeowner earning 20,000 a year who loses their job also loses more than 70% of their net income. Worse is to come. At the start of the pandemic, Sunak increased tax credits and universal credit by 20 a week (1,040 a year). As things stand, he is preparing to risk mass suffering by withdrawing the rise at the end of March.

The fantasy land of Sweden where sickness never comes is a fairytale. By not locking down in the spring, Sweden had a more protracted outbreak with far more deaths per capita than its neighbours. Admittedly, its death rate was not as bad as Britains. But then no European country had a death rate as bad as Britains because no other European country put the village idiot in charge. Nor did the mastermind Tegnell save the Swedish economy. Spending fell by nearly as much in Sweden, which did not lock down, as in Denmark, which did. As for the claim that Sweden would avoid a second wave, Swedish health officials are now proposing local lockdowns of a type we know too well. Sweden may not have been spared the storm but it has lessons on how to shelter society until the storm passes. However deeply it claims to love Scandinavia, the Conservative party is the last organisation on Earth willing to learn from it.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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Welcome to libertarian Covid fantasy land thats Sweden to you and me - The Guardian

A small business owner in the South Okanagan has thrown his hat into B.C.s provincial election ring.

This week, Keith MacIntyre was named as the BC Libertarian Party candidate for the Penticton electoral district.

The owner and CEO of Big Bear Software, MacIntyre is the third candidate in the riding.

Dan Ashton of the BC Liberals has held the seat since 2013, with the NDP announcing Summerland mayor Toni Boot as their candidate on Sept. 16.

In a press release, MacIntyre says hes lived in Penticton for the past 10 years, and that hes also the president of the Okanagan School of the Arts.

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He says hes been disillusioned with partisan politics for a long time and believes that the current state of democracy, polarized politics and perpetuating bureaucracy is damaging to Canadians.

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The polarization between the two so-called wings is getting worse, said MacIntyre, and we have lost the ability to have meaningful debates with each other without being accused of being right or left wing.

MacIntyre says hes in the process of gathering signatures to file nomination papers with Elections BC.

He says he has the 75 required signatures but is seeking more, adding he will file on Monday.

2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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B.C. Election: Small business owner to run for BC Libertarian Party in Penticton riding - Global News

The official ballot for the upcoming General Election on Nov. 3 reads: For United States Representative, you may vote for one or leave it blank. __ Dusty Johnson - Republican Party. __ Randy Uriah Luallin - Libertarian Party.

Luck of the draw lists incumbent Johnson first on the ballot and Luallin next for the two-year term.

Luallin, a Hot Spring resident, began a 10-day tour of South Dakota East River on Sept. 30. After talking with voters in Pierre, he and his wife, Rajni, headed to Gettysburg. My wife and I are traveling in a little camper across South Dakota, said Luallin. They also had their large dog Kiowa.

I was approached at the Libertarian convention in Pierre (June 2019 in Rapid City), and said I would run. It seemed like a huge task, actually an important task said Luallin. Ive been distraught concerning the division in this country - a very dysfunctional duality. My main objective is to bring it back together.:

Luallin has run for local political offices in the past; one being for county commissioner in Boulder County, Louisville, Colorado. He has run for a mayorship. He said he has lived in South Dakota pushing six years, and has run for Fall River County Commissioner. I have experience running for office, said Luallin.

He believes running as a Libertarian is an advantage. We have reached the point where we have ballot access, and that was a hard road. People are becoming disillusioned with the current establishment, said Luallin. I can walk with both camps - Democrat and Republican - because I share a lot of the same things. That will allow me to work for solutions instead of our all-too-common gridlock.

He illustrated two of his top running points. Almost my entire life - and Im 62 - weve been engaged in armed conflict of some type. That has to come to an end. We have wasted our youth in foreign conflicts, and achieved almost nothing. Our military strength should be for defensive purposes, said Luallin. I am a veteran - Army infantry. We have a fine military; it should not be used to ingratiate interest groups or whomever.

There is a tremendous need to remove the government intrusion into our lives, homes, businesses, and our pocketbooks. True liberty, true freedom, requires we are the best judge of what deals with us. As long as we are not hurting someone else or damaging property, we should be left alone, said Luallin. Business goes under the same concept: we need to reduce legislation that ingratiates certain businesses or interest groups and subsidises the picking of winners and losers. There should be an equal playing field in the free market.

Dusty has tremendous energy, and he is young, acknowledged Luallin. At the same time, he tends to react. As in: not fully reading legislation before voting for it. He has a 50% record of voting with the Constitution. I will be 100%, said Luallin.

Other than a soldier, Ive been a mason for 35 years. I am supposedly retired, but they never let you really retire because everybody has a small job for you; so I say that Im retired, said Luallin.

Dusty Johnson, currently a Mitchell resident, has been the incumbent since Jan. 2019. He just turned 44, and his wife is Jacquelyn.

Certainly, growing up in Pierre helped with me originally becoming interested in politics and public office, said Dusty Johsnon. I was inspired by our leaders. A working class family, we benefited from government programs. The proper role of government is to build independence rather than dependence.

Johnsons background includes being on the three-person South Dakota Public Utilities Commissioner from 2005 to 2011. He was then chief of staff to Governor Dennis Daugaard until 2014. Until he was elected to the U.S. Congress, he was the vice president of Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell.

I have respect for the Libertarian Party, said Johnson. They interject ideas into government, and the voters really win. I am a Republican because we work toward a limited government. There is a role of government to lead, but too often people look to the government to solve problems that should be out-of-government. Society works best when balancing families, business and government.

One of Luallins strengths is he loves the country and has energetic optimism. Hes willing to put himself out there. Hes a heck of a good guy, said Johnson. The voters can determine for themselves any of his weaknesses. They dont need me to lead them to where to drink that water.

When running an election campaign, I have learned that voters want to know what you have done. I think some people believe you really cant get anything accomplished in Washington. I have gotten four major bills of mine out of the House. I am the top Republican on the Agriculture subcommittee, and I have been the whip to such things as Mexico/America agreements.

I feel good about my work to benefit cattle and farming and rural concerns. Few legislators in Washington work for these issues, said Johnson.

The General Election is Nov. 3. The deadline to register to vote or to change a voters information, is Oct. 19. Early voting - sometimes referred to as absentee ballots - is already available.

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Luallin and Johnson speak out for S.D.'s U.S. House of Representatives seat - The Capital Journal

On the battleground of Covid-19, a struggle is under way for the soul of the Conservative Party. It is being fought out between Tory loyalists who back Boris Johnsons approach to the pandemic and small-state Conservatives. The latter compare the arbitrary, even autocratic approach implied by the Governments latest anti-coronavirus measures to Big Brother in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. The question is: who will win?

It would be simplistic to characterise this clash of ideology as one of authoritarians and libertarians. Neither the Prime Minister nor the rest of the Cabinet would, in normal times, be seen as advocates of big government, let alone a quasi-dictatorship. As for the rebels, who are said to number up to 80 MPs, they are not yet a coherent, organised lobby group, comparable to the Thatcherites and Wets, or the various factions on the European Union.

And yet such labels are useful. The Tory authoritarians, if we may call them that, believe that in a public health emergency of this magnitude, the end justifies practically any means. So they greet with equanimity such draconian restrictions on individual liberty as the ban on singing and dancing in pubs, or 4,000 fines for reckless refusal to self-isolate. The authoritarians are also relaxed about bypassing normal parliamentary scrutiny, on the grounds that there simply isnt time for the endless procedural skirmishing that has dragged out the Brexit process. Their justification for toeing the party line is that the sooner the country submits to a strict prophylactic regime, the sooner the pandemic will be over and that this is what the public wants and expects from the Government anyway.

The libertarian rebels are dismayed and angry about what they see as a betrayal of everything they went into politics to do. Their de facto spokesman is Steve Baker, for many years a thorn in the side of David Cameron and Theresa May as a leading light of the European Research Group (ERG).

Baker is a fascinating figure, not least because he is a rare beast in the Tory menagerie: a principled libertarian who is not ashamed to stand by his convictions even when they are unpopular. A stubborn, self-made Cornishman with an RAF background, Baker belongs to the international libertarian movement. He helped found the Cobden Institute to propagate the gospel of 19th-century classical liberalism and Austrian thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

Such doctrines are much more influential in the United States. There libertarian ideas are popularised by the novels of Ayn Rand, promoted by philanthropists, think tanks and other institutions, such as George Mason University, but rooted in the American Revolution. Here in the UK, libertarians have never controlled the commanding heights of the economy in the way that Alan Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.

Yet under Margaret Thatcher the currents of classical liberal and libertarian thought coursed through the veins of the British body politic, including limited government, privatisation, free market economics and low taxation. Unlike most Tory MPs, Steve Baker is a trained engineer; yet he has a profound aversion to social engineering of any kind. Libertarian hostility to the EU is not based on nationalism indeed, they tend to favour the free movement of people but on the regulatory mania of the European model. Libertarians are usually sticklers for parliamentary procedure, because only constant vigilance can ensure democratic accountability of national or supranational authorities. Hence the ERGs erstwhile hero Jacob Rees-Mogg, now Leader of the House of Commons, is under pressure to allow MPs proper consultation and debate before yet more draconian rules are imposed.

Indeed, Boris Johnson himself is seen on the small-state wing of the party as a hostage to Big Brother. Comparing the Prime Minister to King Thoden in Tolkiens Lord of the Rings, Baker issued an appeal to liberate the old Boris: The king is under the spell of his advisers. And he has to be woken up from that spell.

When he was a columnist for Charles Moores Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson backed libertarian campaigns for the decriminalisation of cannabis and the privatisation of the BBC. It is true that he has elevated his former Editor to the Lords and hopes to appoint him as chairman of the BBC. In that capacity, no doubt, Lord Moore of Etchingham would infuriate all the right people and might even hasten the inevitable demise of the licence fee.

But now that Boris Johnson is firmly ensconced in Downing Street, he cannot afford to risk the wrath of the British people, which has yet to be persuaded that there is any alternative to local lockdowns and other restrictions on social activity. It is not the spell of his political and civil service advisers that compels him to take ever more authoritarian measures, so much as the fear of losing touch with public opinion.

The bumbling mannerisms and flashes of brilliance that made Boris a star in peacetime have not deserted him, but they are out of place in time of war the war against coronavirus. He seems to many, not least in his own party, to have temporarily lost his touch. Yet there is nobody to replace him. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is more popular because it is his job to dispense largesse, but if there were any substantial policy difference between No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street, we would know about it by now.

As long as the Government remains united behind the authoritarian approach, the Tory libertarians have nowhere to go. The anti-lockdown movement has a legitimate place in the public debate, but it is powerless to prevent the curfew, surveillance and social isolation juggernaut from crashing through. The pandemic has yet to subside. Until it does, the sad words of King Thoden will echo through Englands green but not so pleasant land: The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

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The Tories are divided between libertarians and authoritarians. Who will win? - TheArticle

Not all heroes wear masks. So tweeted Tory contrarian Toby Young in July after fellow freedom warrior James Delingpole posted a selfie of himself maskless in a supermarket. How daring. How heroic.

The tweet was revealing not just of how degraded debates about freedoms and liberties have become, but also of how a certain cabal of rightwing libertarians has come to dominate the discussions on these issues. One reason they have been able to do so is because too many on the left have vacated the space.

This week, the Coronavirus Act 2020, which became law in March, giving the government emergency powers to deal with the pandemic, is due for renewal by parliament. There has been criticism of the law from civil liberties groups and from a handful of human rights lawyers. Opposition, both inside and outside parliament, has, however, come mainly from the libertarian right. Yet the powers that the government has given itself should be a crucial issue not just for Tory rebels or rightwing contrarians, but for all those who take the pandemic seriously but also take seriously questions of liberty and of the need for proper scrutiny of government actions.

The pandemic is a major public health emergency that makes restraints on liberties inevitable. Such restraints ought, however, to be proportionate. And they should involve measures that work. In Britain, the government has grievously mishandled virtually every plan to reduce Covid-19 infection rates, from inadequate PPE to a catastrophic policy towards care homes to the debacle of test and trace. It has combined such failures with the imposition of more authoritarian regulations, which seem less about bolstering the wider coronavirus strategy than about compensating for its failures.

The government has grievously mishandled virtually every plan to reduce Covid-19 infection rates

Requiring people to wear masks in shops or on public transport is proportionate (and the opposition to it pathetic, not heroic). But allowing the police to detain anyone they have reasonable grounds to suspect is potentially infectious (as the Coronavirus Act does), or imposing 10,000 fines for organising protests, or making mass surveillance easier, should more than give us pause. As last weeks report of the parliamentary select committee on human rights puts it: It is unacceptable that many thousands of people are being fined when regulations contain unclear and ambiguous language, the police do not fully understand their powers and a significant percentage of prosecutions have been shown to be wrongly charged.

Worse than the act itself is the fact that so many regulations have been pushed through by ministerial decree with little or no parliamentary scrutiny, making use both of the Coronavirus Act and the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. The Hansard Society has found that, since the start of the pandemic, the government has made law using statutory instruments 242 times. Statutory instruments are a means of bypassing parliamentary scrutiny. They can be made either affirmative, requiring retrospective parliamentary approval, or negative, which ensures that the regulations remain in place unless parliament annuls them within 40 days. The vast majority of statutory instruments relating to coronavirus have been negative, meaning that ministers are making law by default.

There is certainly public support for tough coronavirus regulations. According to polls, 78% of the British public back the latest government restrictions and almost half think those restrictions should be even harsher.

Its a public mood that has been shaped by government policy. Rather than build on the community-mindedness that flourished at the beginning of the pandemic, the government has helped inculcate mistrust. From the constant finger-pointing to support for snooping on ones neighbours, ministers have encouraged the idea that other people are the problem. Rather than nurturing the publics social instincts, they have continually threatened to impose sanctions on those who break rules. The starting point seems to be that people wont do what is necessary, so we need to force them to not a useful way of fostering social trust and solidarity.

The widespread support for government regulations paradoxically reveals the need for greater vigilance. Its precisely when so many support government by diktat that those diktats should be particularly closely scrutinised. It would be a calamity if such scrutiny was confined to those who imagine that not wearing a mask is heroic or have an ideological opposition to pandemic restrictions.

From free speech to civil liberties, much of the left has in recent years retreated from issues that once helped define it. This has given a free pass to the libertarian right both to don the mantle of freedom and to distort its meaning. The left needs urgently to rediscover its old passion for liberty.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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Where is the voice of the left as 'libertarians' annex the Covid-19 debate? - MSN UK