At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, lots of leisure time and paid holidays, universal healthcare generous maternity provision, inclusion for people with disabilities, free education and universal childcare, freedom to form a relationship and maybe a family with the person of your choice (straight or gay), a woman’s right to choose, tolerance of everyone regardless of faith or race, political freedom and democratic elections under fair conditions, concern for the natural environment and so on. A vision of prosperity for all, even if some degree of inequality might be tolerated to provide incentives and so forth. This wasn’t particularly an ideal limited to the left (in fact parts of the left would have rejected it for something more robustly socialist) but could have been embraced, in its rough outlines, by everyone from the centre-left to people on the centre right such as, for example, Simone Veil.
Some parts of this radiant future even got built, to varying degrees, across parts of Europe other than Scandinavia, in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand. A realistic utopia, in fact.
But
Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.1
Nobody currently thinks our future looks like Universal Scandinavia – and even in places where social democratic parties are in power, such as the UK – nobody thinks that they will advance even the tiniest step towards it. Rather, the likelihood is that even they will retreat. "Nice idea, but unaffordable."