EU-related traffic figures collide with reality

Last week in Brussels the ETSC, the European Transport Safety Council, a body funded by the Commission, presented its first European traffic safety survey.
One of the Commission's main transport goals is that European countries halve the number of road deaths by 2010. The goal is modelled on the Swedish Road Administration's plan from a few years ago to halve the number of road deaths in Sweden by 2007. The Swedish Roads Administration is one dozens of state (supposed) autonomous organisations that run much of Swedish life; their real independence has been questioned by the new Swedish rightwing government, saying the former prime minister, Goran Persson, a social democrat, stuffed these supposed autonomous agencies with cronies, often leading social democrat party figures. The social democrats have ruled Sweden for 65 of the last 75 years; in electoral terms they have been the most successful, hegemonic party of any democratic country. The new government says that one reason why they have stayed in power so long is that Swedish public life is saturated with social democrats in high position who use their agencies as propaganda outfits for the party.

One example: Bo Bylund, a friend of Persson's and a social democrat, apparently puts normal people on retraining programmes and awards early retirement to healthy people in their twenties just to keep the headline figure for employment down. Conservative MEP Christopher Fjellner says "Sweden alone doesn't abide by Eurostat's definition of what unemployment is." The real figure could be as high as 15 percent, much higher than the impressive figure the Swedish unemployment service sends to Brussels.

More murky figures

I too have found an area where Swedish social democrat quango placeman fiddle the books so their masters can stay in power. Traffic safety.
I remember, writing an article for a British Sunday newspaper, visiting the Swedish national roads agency's headquarters in the town of Borlange, northern Sweden. The head of traffic safety drove me around all day in his Volvo, fitted with speed limiter and an alcolock, (an in-car breathalyser, set to become standard in Sweden by 2012). There were an unfeasibly large number of roundabouts in this sparsely populated, mid size town, and every time we slowed down there was this electronic woman's voice squawking:"You are now approaching a roundabout." Eventually we wound up at the road agency's elegant modern headquarters, where its traffic safety boss, Claes Tingvall, and the council traffic boss, greeted each other very chummily. Claes Tingvall, who is in his fifties, is a major European figure in road safety: the president of EuroNCAP, the road crash test organisation, whose surveys of car safety make every headline around the world when they are issued several times a year; he is one of the board members of the ESTC. Everyone who works on traffic issues in Brussels knows him. In a modern office room, with a view of the winter sunset tinted snow, Tingvall painted a fantastic picture of Sweden's road safety innovations - the strict alcohol laws, the flexible safety barriers on minor roads, the successful information campaigns that made Swedes obedient seatbelt wearers, the various electronic anti-swerving devices that Swedish carbuyers now insisted on, following his agency's information campaign. I went away and wrote an article praising Sweden as the country of the future in traffic safety. "The country with zero tolerance for road slaughter".

The proof

Positive coverage like this, and successful self promotion, has ensured that Sweden's views on traffic ssafety are listened to in Brussels. (And probaly got Tingvall his EuroNCAP job.)
So, what of it? Anders Englund, a traffic safety scientist, recently wrote a very critical article of the Road Safety Agency's ways. He basically accused them of fiddling the books: deaths have not halved, sioce the goal was posited in 1998. They have decreased by about ten percent between 1998 and 2005. And deaths, for the year 2006 so far, are rising. And in fact, when the goal was set, in 1998, deaths rose for a few years rather than fell. Yet the picture from 1998 onwards was of a constant fall in deat hrates. His contention was that the figures that Tingvall presided over were falsfied because deaths due to heart attack in hospital and other subsequent crash death causes was not included after 2001, giving a false, flattering picture of 2006 statistics. Fiddle number one.

That was over a year ago. And now, last week, the Swedish roads agency posted figures to the ETSC, which it presented at a press conference, that put Sweden in the top four of 25 EU members for reduction in road traffic deaths. The usual story, known to every journalist who picks up Eurostat press relases: Sweden at or near the top. But are the statistics correct? No they are not. A quick glance at the Road agency's website - a two minute job - shows that road deaths have fallen by 20 percent, not 25 percent as the ETSC presents it, in the last five years. (The drop would have been even lower had the reference point been 1998, not 2001: ten percent, as I said.)

Not much difference you might think; but yes. For most other Europpean countries have posted a drop in road traffic deaths too, of the order of 20 percent. Recalculate the figures according to Vagverket's own figures and that puts Sweden among the European average, not the European lead. (A lead, incidentally, occupied by France.) Sweden moves a large number of spaces to the right on the European bar chart. Fiddle number two. Tingvall's boss, Lennart Skogo, is paid up social democrat, which could explain why he fiddles the figures. He wants to keep his masters in power. Swedish statistics in Brussels ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, and perhaps Tingvall should reconsider his job.

An offer DG science cannot refuse

The over-funded DG Research, which has never come up with a useful drug, is acting stingy when faced with a system that has produced breakthroughs in so called neglected diseases common in the third world but which have not proved profitable for big pharma to pursue, in part because customers are poor and in part because, when companies do develop drugs to combat TB, malaria and leishmaniasis, their costs, introduction or storage mechanisms are completely inappropriate for the tropics. Only 13 drugs have been developed in the area of neglected disease since 1975, of which 12 are inappropriate for their customer base. Result: some of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world continue to kill people in poor countries. “Big pharma know nothing about the third world,” said one insider from Medecins sans Frontieres. .
But in recent years, something called PPPs, or private public partnerships, have started up which seem to work: they are an alliance between NGOs, who can identify local conditions and can furnish cheap clinical trials; governments and charitable foundations, who put up the money, and big pharma, who have drugs-making expertise. The projects, which number dozens, are set up on a not for profit basis with the multinationals standing to gain in terms of reputation and in future positioning in developing markets. They have a further advantage: the high innovation level, testing many molecules for neglected disease drugs gives the drugs makers a good source of knowledge about new compounds.
Development costs, at $10 - $20m per drug, are absurdly cheap compared to the latest vanity drug developed for the western market. Though profit sensitive, the money is taken care of by governments and charities.
Chief among these is the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, MSF and the UK and US governments. The European commission? “They fund less than one percent of this, because they are wedded to their big multinational framework projects,” said one insider.” Perhaps they should have another look at these proposals.

Madness: right debate, wrong forum

John Bowis MEP, the conservatives’ health spokesman, has launched the European parliament response to the commission green paper on mental health.
It is all very worthy stuff. He believes strongly in the issue, and why not. There is even a reference to the Lisbon process – a sane continent is a wealthy, productive one.
The subject is, vast, and well depressing, so from a recent hearing he organised here are just nuggets. No matter how you look at it, psychiatric institutions are reservoirs of human suffering… The contradiction of psychiatry is that you that you herd patients together and expect them to feel better…For many patients, waiting for the cure is a complete waste of time: the miracle of the cure will never come…The psychiatric system is not nearly able to cure as much as it thinks, so waiting for it to do so keeps patients submissive and passive…Patients are people with lives to be led, some aspects of which may require professional assistance…France has the greatest number of psychiatrists per capita…With populations growing older and dementia rises, mental health strategies have to be integrated into public health.
Someone with mental health problems needs a one stop shop ensuring contact, access to medical care, housing and other social care needs, income legal services and rehabilitation. But if one is ill, one needs the security of home, not the isolation of high rise flats. A paradox: increased resources only come when a man jumps into the lion’s den at the zoo, or another stabs someone on the London underground, and the media and politicians clamour for action – which happens, at a price: increased stigma. Bowis concludes his report movingly.
“We need to look into the eyes of people with mental health problems. When we do, we see reflected back the confusion of emotions and thoughts. We see the fear and worry. We see the tears of frustration and despair. But we also see the hope – the hope that we will listen; that we will understand; that we will care; that we will act; that we can help.”
The health spokes man of another party said: "It's all good stuff, but mental health really an EU issue? It's surely for the nation states to settle."

petrolhead MEP finds paradise in Iraq

An entry in an occasional series about what Brussels and European parliament alumni are up to. Geoff Hoon had a bit of a reputation as an amiable petrol-head – someone who likes cars – when based in Brussels as MEP. (Labour, 84-94) Later, as British defence secretary during the latest Iraq war, he obviously got a bit carried away with boys’ toys, according to his former colleague, Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose diaries were serialised in the British press last week:
“March 24, 2003. We did warn Geoff Hoon in the cabinet when Geoff was going all gung-ho about smart bombs and the rest of it. Minister John Reid warned caution but someone else said ‘Hear, hear,’ and Tony Blair turned to him and said: ‘No, no, that's not the way. We need great caution and we don't hype anything.’ But I'm afraid Geoff just gets carried away. It just seems to happen to people in the Ministry of Defence - all this Boy's Own stuff again.’
What Blunkett fails to understand is this was all done in a greater cause: to impress Hoon’s Washington counterpart – one Donald Rumsfeld. According to another recent memoir, by the British ambassador in Washington, many of Britain’s politicians failed to gain the respect of their US counterparts when they visited the US capital in the run-up to the war. Hoon and the “intimidating” Rumsfeld found it hard to get on to the same wavelength, according to ambassador Christopher Meyer.
“It was like getting pandas to mate. Hoon got nervous in Rumsfeld's presence.”
Only the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, and [now Home Secretary], John Reid, stood out, "like Masai warriors in a crowd of pygmies,” Meyer writes.

Another agreeable waste of taxpayers' money

Craig Barrett, chairman of the world’s largest microchip maker Intel, gave a keynote speech at the Regions and Cities conference held at the palace of lesser vanities, the Committee of the Regions. The funny thing is, though I spent an afternoon there, I cannot find a single interesting thing about the event. It was all about competitiveness. This is a place where assorted worthy supporters of the social model usually discuss the merits of the 35 hour week. This, be it noted, when Asia works 35 hour days.

UK-US alliance on the ropes, surely

Two reports, one from my magazine, the Lancet, have kicked up a bit of a stir in Britain in the last few weeks, and the European Commission would be wise to take note. Britain has started to worry seriously about climate change.
The generally positive support for the advice contained in the Stern report published on Tuesday 31 October on the importance of imminently tackling the problems of climate change arguably marks a shift in public opinion in the traditional “dirty man of Europe” towards the environment.
The shift can be seen on both sides of the political spectrum. Predictably the Guardian’s George Monbiot, scourge of the kind of energy companies that hold emollient receptions in the grand hotels of Brussels, wrote effusively that the report – authored by a respected economist – had “swung the argument even before any of us had finished reading it.” More surprising perhaps was
Matthew d’Ancona, a rightwing political magazine editor well known for his Bush sympathies, writing last week “that the science of global warming has more or less arrived at a point of consensus, symbolised in popcorn politics by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.
“There are still doughty sceptics urging caution, such as Nigel Lawson [Margaret Thatcher’s onetime finance minister], who will deliver his preliminary thoughts on Stern on Tuesday.”
He added: “But the political horse has already bolted.”
All three main parties share a surprising degree of alignment on this: new conservative party leader David Cameron repositioned the Tories as a green party at the annual conference a month ago; conservation is after all a “conservative issue”; the party has a new symbol, an oak tree. Cameron needs young votes; he also genuinely burns for the issue. Last month, he challenged the government to introduce a climate change bill; if it did, the official opposition would work hard to support it.
The centrist liberal democrats have long since embraced things environmental. And then there is the Labour party, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the chancellor, clearly had reversed previous scepticism and gave vocal support to the report’s publication, with Blair saying the Stern report represented the “most important report on the future” ever produced by his government and that if the findings were not heeded the “results would be disastrous”.
“The scientific evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases is now overwhelming,” he told the Press Association.
Stern reports that global temperatures have already gone up by half a degree, that melting glaciers will increase flood risk, crop yields will fall, particularly in Africa, that rising sea levels could leave 200m people displaced, 40% of species could face extinction, and there will be more extreme weather. Temperatures could rise up to five degrees this century, leading to widespread famine and death, of 300m people, and a drop in global GDP of 20%.
Sterns writes that the damage can be minimised if action costing 1% of current GDP – equal to global advertising spend - is taken now, and his range of suggested measures include creating a global market in carbon pricing, extending the European emissions trading scheme to India, the US and China, setting new, tough targets for the EETS, and create a new commission to lead British companies to develop climate change solutions. A consequence of his report is that the environment minister, David Milliband, has granted Cameron’s wish and will now propose a climate change bill in November.
There is a problem with all this, of course. Commentators were quick to note that Britain could not do things alone, that even if the country became carbon neutral overnight Chinese growth would negatively compensate within a year, and that the biggest polluter of the moment, the US, and the big polluters of the future. China and India, are not set to convert at this moment of Britain’s choosing, just because London has had its revelation.
"What I see so far today does not give me any reason to believe that Mr Stern can be a spokesman who can change minds and open ears here," Samuel Thernstrom, a former communications director for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Bush White House, now at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank, told a British paper last week. .
"I don't see a whole lot new here. They're hanging a lot on what they call 'robust
economic analysis', but there's a lot of uncertainty here that they don't acknowledge."
In addition, the British government’s choice of Al Gore, who lost to George Bush six years ago in the most contentious presidential campaign ever, as its special adviser on climate change would probably reduce the report’s impact in Washington.
Even D’Ancona, who supports Bush, thinks it’s unlikely the US will start embracing policies to fight climate change soon.
Meanwhile the Lancet medical journal’s report that 600,000 Iraqis have died in the war, one third from direct action, has further alienated British public opinion. The figure is ten times higher than that cited by Bush, higher than the numbers killed in the Chechnya and Bosnian wars; Bush said the Lancet report was “not credible”. Consider these two findings - that global warming is the hugest threat we face today, and the US is doing nothing about it, despite the fact that Britain wants to. And the fact that Britain has been dragged into a war with the USA that now turns out to have caused far more deaths from allied action than the war in Yugoslavia from the Serbian army that sent Milosevic to the Hague international war criminal tribunal. Even the Tories, as remarked in a previous post, seem to be edging away from the US.
Reading the blogs, it seems to me clear that the British public are more hostile to the UK-US alliance than they have ever been. The European commission should seize the opportunity

Doctor really does know best

Who wants choice?
So, paternalism is out, choose-and-book is in: the doctor tapping in a few parameters offering a screenful of options as to what, when and how precisely the patient is to be treated. Choice of any hospital in the UK by 2008, subject to waiting lists. Stern advice, based on expertise and education? Not anymore. The patient, like the customer, is always right.
The new NHS, if it works, might be the democrat’s dream, but will choice actually involve better patient care? Not according to a recent report in the Journal of Internal General medicine.
Suppose a deadly influenza moves across the world, arriving in Europe. There is no cure, but a 10% chance of dying of the flu. However there is a vaccine – but with a potential side effect: there is a 5% chance of dying of the less dangerous variant of the ailment that the vaccine might induce. What would you take? A no brainer, one would have thought.
Apparently not: less than half the population would take the vaccine themselves if given the choice. It seems people are fundamentally not rational when it comes to assign risk regards themselves. When dealing with others, however, understanding of the probabilities – hardly taxing – take over, and the more distant the personal relation the more rational the guinea pigs in this hypothetical scenario carried out by psychologists for the journal.
But 57 percent said they would give it to their children; 63 percent said that if they were doctors they would give it to patients; and 73 percent said that if they were the medical director of a hospital they would recommend the vaccine for all patients.
In other words, people are more rational at making decisions for others than for themselves – a fortiori this applies to doctors making choices on behalf of patients, rather than the patients choosing their own treatments. Doctors have expertise, too, not just that essential objective standpoint. You might be better of, for that matter, if your friend made your choice for treatment Aristocratic socialists – who combine paternalism with equality - such as Allyson Pollock and Colin Leys have decried patient choice as a chimera: “People don’t choice, they just want care: it is like the fore brigade, not the supermarket,” they say. And they could well be right. At least if the choices they have to make are their own. Perhaps the best combination would be not patients’ choice, but doctors’ choice. The paternalists are right after all.

Tories, Europe and climate change

An occasional article in a series of Tory rapprochement with Europe. I know Tories in Brussels who hate Europe and what it stands for; but are they being let down by those back at base. I will be monitoring these developments both in the UK and London and will be bringing them to you.
There was a revealing moment on Newsnight, Britain's premier news programme, last week.
An inexperienced Labour environment minister had just been skewered in an interview which recognised that global warming was the planet's biggest problem but that only a tenth had been spent on combating climate change in the last five years compared to fighting the "global war on terror", a "war" whose utility and effectiveness has increasingly been questioned across the political spectrum in Britain.
As the sombre statistics about global climate change were being digested - we have only ten years before the barrel rolls irrevocably over the falls - the next segment cut to the annual opposition Tory party conference, held last week. You might have expected there to have been a thematic followup; but no, the chief item was a distasteful chase of the higher education minister and former Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson to try and make Mr former straight bananas to come up with a witty quip, or "gaffe" for the TV cameras. There is a point when adulation and persecution become almost indistinguishable, and Johnson was filmed being chased into the press centre; when he emerged, his hair a characteristic haystack, he was pursued by literally dozens of hacks and hackettes tape recorders and mikes aloft down the Bournemouth promenade. "We need you, Boris, we don't have a story, nothing happened today" shrieked one. No wonder the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. One of the most intelligent and congenial men in British politics, and a true free thinker, often grotesquely caricatured as a clown, looked close to tears.
The Newsnight piece, barely protected by knowing self irony, rather reinforced the point the pug-eared environment minister, who looked as if he has been born after Kyoto, made that finally shut interviewer Jeremy Paxman up: "We are all in this together." A media focusing in trivialities rather than the biggest issue of our time is part of the problem. Britain's opposition party had spent half a day on debates discussing the environment. Newsnight is the most serious programme on British television. There was more - much more - coverage of Boris on the BBC news website the next day
A Tory conference is not usually a place where a pro European can feel the atmosphere congenial. And the new Tory's party's headbangers, or, as they have been named, British Neocons, certainly behave with the usual slavering atlanticism; acting, as someone put it, quoting Leon Blum on the 1930s French communist party, as a "nationalist party - but someone else’s nationalist party."
But it would be misleading to think they are any longer dominant. For the good news is, the new leader of the party - David Cameron - might actually want and need to get closer to Europe.
Yes, stop press.
What's more, he has the support of a headbanger of yore, the formidably intelligent former party leader but now shadow foreign secretary, William Hague.
The reason? Cameron has seen the truth, even as most of the media hasn't: seen the ice shelves the size of Belgium shedding into the South Antarctic sea. The bare summit of Kilimanjaro whose giant snowcaps just thirty years ago provided a picturesque backdrops to photographs of big game hunters: the sieved Greenland icecap dotted with as many holes as a slab of ice on a warm March day. The satellite pictures that show that half the North Pole ice has gone already, and that it will be possible to sail to the end point of the compass on warm breeze by 2030. He also knows that the US administration is run by fanatically un-empirical former oil executives denying global warming and fighting wars to secure US energy interests abroad for America's enormously wasteful industry and transport capacity.
Where else to turn?
I urge you to consider Hague's speech on foreign affairs on Tuesday. This was very skilful speech. On the surface this was red meat, pressing all the buttons of the bingo hall audience of over sixties that dominate Tory conventions.
"We need to be able to make much more of a body Labour ministers hardly ever mention: the Commonwealth." He talked about confronting terrorism, Iran, and, a "resolve to defeat terrorists whose murder of innocent civilians can never be defended or excused." He spent seven long minutes, half the speech, criticising Europe, for laughs, making easy jokes about Blair's British presidency. "The British people believe integration has gone far enough and so do we." But listen more closely and read the speech and you find that - he does not exclude a new constitution, albeit subject to a referendum and with the justice and home affairs veto abolition removed.
And when you realise that the only foreign politician he has mentioned by name is the Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, with whom he hopes to form a party in the European parliament, and listen to the remark that he wants to "give leadership to a European Union in crisis it so desperately needs" and you realised that - with its six minutes, partly devoted to urging abstruse institutional changes - Europe is indeed that single part of the world where Britain wants to spend the next few years constructing a relationship. The US he but mentioned, briefly, twice.
Now, I urge you to consider Cameron's speech. It was spoken under the party's new logo of a scribbled oak tree (old symbol: a hand holding a torch: the struggles of the Thatcher years) in a conference centre bedecked by a picture backdrop of greenery and trees. There was even a juice bar. A fifty minute long speech ticking off various policy areas gave rise to disparate headlines; but he really did spell it out in his summary the big theme: "NHS, society, family and the environment." He gave praise to the Al Gore film on climate change which was shown to delegates earlier in the week, and to strengthen his credentials he rolled out that cartoon opponent Norman Tebbit who supposedly over dinner told him that "I though you were green and lean" but "now I realise you are green, lean and mean."
In the media coverage that followed, some focused on the NHS pledge, others on the embrace of Mauslim communities, the critique of US's activities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Reporters said he pledged to offer substance rather than spin, and so on. Very heterogenous.
Only two commentators saw Europe and/or singled out the real seriousness of heart about the green theme. Jonathan Freedland ofo the Guardian said that this would be an opportunity for Gordon Brown to split the party between the euro-sceptics and those who realised that a supranational grouping of nations is – and will continue to be – the only way to effect the collective action needed to bring down carbon emissions. .
Martin Kettle of the Guardian focused on the Hague speech: “Hague managed with considerable oratorical legerdemain to promote a policy of renewed Conservative re-engagement within the EU without frightening the conference into one of its all too instinctive displays of Europhobia.”
“I waited for the hisses, the boos, the shouts of disagreement that that remark might so easily have provoked in a less skilfully prepared speech. But nothing came. And in the silence, Hague leaped across to dry political land, with an assertion that "our place is to be in Europe but not run by Europe." Another skilful touch, that. It sounded like an anti-EU remark, when in fact it was the opposite, a commitment to Tory participation in the EU.”
It wiwll be interesting to see how the Tories now propose working with the EU in order to fight their big campaign issue - and whether this will extend to other areas. Also, whether the commission will take note.

Fresh Swedish gov't recruits Brussels alumni

Another entry on what Brussels ex-people are up to.
Interesting times in Sweden. First there was a change of government, from the long reigning socialists to a centre right coalition – an event rarer than the Nobel committees announcing winners we had ever heard of. Then there was the news that Sweden, which has been a semi detached member of Europe during outgoing premier Göran Persson’s last years, would be returning to the heart of Europe with two well known Brussels people at the top foreign posts. They are Cecilia Malmström MEP, whose unsuccessful “unseat Strasbourg” campaign clearly at least gave her a seat in Stockholm. She becomes Europe minister. And Carl Bildt, a former Swedish PM, well known on the Brussels diplomatic circuit, as former Balkans envoy and prominent European pro-unity speechmaker, writer and, er, thinker. He gets the plum job of foreign minister, and is, in a young government, Sweden’s senior politician in terms of experience and worldliness.
Then – within a week of taking office – the government has already been gripped by scandals. Two ministers have resigned: the minister in charge of culture and therefore television was found not to have paid her TV licence for 16 years. The trade minister resigned because she paid her cleaner under the table.And what about other targets? Carl Bildt is known to have a skeleton in his closet – profitable involvement with the Swedish Lundin oil company, which prospected in Sudan and which various charities have accused of being complicit in Sudanese government ethnic cleansing thousands of people from the oilfield areas. For now, though, they have left him alone. Let sleeping dogs lie perhaps.

Was NATO a cause of minister's murder?

The link to NATO was Sweden’s lifeline during the cold war - yet Sweden let it rot away because the socialist prime minister at the time had, for domestic purposes, created a rhetorical picture of Sweden as neutral, aloof - and slightly judgmental, in fact - of the two superpower blocs.
According to new research into Sweden’s often two-faced neutrality policy, the Swedish defence researcher Robert Dalsjo has discovered that the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme thirty years ago barely bothered to inform his successor as PM, Thorbjorn Falldin, a conservative, about the secret agreements, presumably for fear that it would expose the socialist poseur and prominent critic of Nixonian foreign policy to the charges of hypocrisy. While presenting himself as a leader of the non aligned nations, Palme presided over a secret scheme - instituted by his predecessors - that would allow refuelling afacilities to NATO aircraft, over flight rights, and extensive patrol schedule coordination, including radio compatibility with NATO. OPening a flank on Russia for NATO air patrols have the west a formidable advantage over Russia; in return for which NATO had secretly pledged to bail Sweden out in the event of an attack to keep the Oresund straits open for instance, allowing the Baltic fleet out into the open sea. There were also plans for where and how the Swedish army would fall back to positions that could be supplied by the Norwegian ports such as Narvik, and structure of partisan resistance that could be run from London.
But because he didn’t pass this on, Falldin was in the dark, so was the new chief of general staff and the defence relationship with the west lapsed. The rhetoric - or rather lack of it - became the new reality; Sweden had suddenly become naked.
The revelations from Dalsjo, published with the help of the institute of war studies at King’s in London and to appear in bookform later this year are interesting because they help to explain the intense suspicion felt towards Palme by those who knew about the old NATO cooperation when he returned to power in 1982, sharpened by a number of submarine incidents shortly after he was elected.
Navy sonars tracked suspicious objects crawling around the Stockholm archipelago; they were assumed to be Russian subs - one sub had actually run aground a year earlier, appeared on the TV news worldwide, before the sub was set free, amid much Russian apology, and let home. Palme’s failure to condemn what was seen as a sustained campaign of provocations was felt to be worrying by many.
With the benefit of knowledge of the Dalsjo revelations about Palme letting the NATo relationship lapse, it is possible to see that navy insiders who knew about NATO, which the general public didn't, could detect a pattern of nonchalance towards the west and appeasement of the east which clearly seemed to continue after his re-election Would they be worried enough to act on this, and what could have been a catalyst.
Earlier this year I had lunch with a London-based writer/researcher who had once made documentaries.
The documents passed to me by the man I had lunch with earlier this year concerned the agenda of a summit meeting between Gorbachev and Palme in April 1986 that seemed to indicate a switch in Palme’s post election pattern of behavior: from just publicly repudiating the NATO connection to actively doing the USSR’s bidding in northern Europe. The document said
Palme was to discuss Danish and Norwegian neutrality in return for a nuclear free zone and a Finnish-style Soviet security guarantee for northern Europe; the Danes had probably not been consulted but there you go.
Before he died of a heart attack at Houston airport a few years ago, the documentary was probing how far this information travelled from SOPs - Stay Behind’s headquarters in Brussels - and how, if at all, it was acted on.
Like Gladio in Italy, the would be partisan cells contained some dodgy people as well as fervent right wing anti communists - with some overlap with the disaffected Swedish military convinced of Palme's betrayal.
The Dalsjo report is the most complete exposure of Sweden’s far reaching NATO cooperation to be made available to the Swedish public. It has been hinted at before but many Swedes have preferred to think of Sweden as having been completely neutral, aloof by its own efforts. This has informed and continues to inform Sweden’s rather-high handed view of itself, regards Europe and the rest of the world. Last year a majority in a poll opposed NATO membership, presumably because Swedes thought they had looked after that side of things themselves. Further, the revelation of the partisan structures for the first time confirm thiny’s private findings, suggesting he was on the right track. The onion is shedding its layers; if Sweden’s equivalent of Gladio did kill Palme because fear he assisted the communist threat it sets Sweden firmly in the postwar European context, where the counter revolutionary activities of the various stay-behind unit set up to combat Communist infiltration has been called the biggest untold European story since the second world war. In Italy, Gladio is suspected of having killed Aldo Moro, the Christian democrat tprime minister who committed the sin of allowing communists into government. In Sweden they killed Olof Palme