There’s a bit of a debate going on in Sweden just now – although not as widespread or rancid as in Britain or the USA – about immigration; with the usual suspects – the rising right-wing Sverigedemokraterna party – leading the charge against it, but also a sizeable movement vocally defending immigration, using the slogan ‘without immigrants Sweden would collapse.’
Stuck here right now in a Stockholm hospital bed I can see the force of that argument. Nearly all the medical and nursing staff looking after me come originally from abroad. I have nurses, doctors and physios from Kenya, Eritrea, the Gambia (she was pleasantly surprised that I knew where that is), Uganda, Sudan, Botswana, Vietnam, Armenia, Greece and the Kurdish part of Turkey. There may be a few Finns and Danes too; but they melt in more. It’s a wonderfully cosmopolitan community, reminding me of my college days. How dull it would be if I was only being doctored and nursed by Swedes!
Porter’s Pensées 
Bernard You might like to check out Simon Reeve’s recent three parter on BBC2 – Scandanavia. He is a good reporter with some very intelligent observations about all five countries….worth a look. His observations about Swedish crime rates were quite revealing. Best wishes John Evans
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Britain’s not so different – thank God! I spent a day in hospital recently as an outpatient, which left me with intense feelings of gratitude and affection for four different people – a surgeon, an anaesthetist, a recovery nurse and a ward nurse; I’d like to hug every one of them, although clearly this would be very inappropriate. Not one of them was of British ancestry.
I’m reminded of a nasty story I read after the Brexit vote in 2016, about a consultant of Chinese origin. The day after the vote a patient said to him, quite cheerfully and seemingly out of the blue, “Surprised you’re here!” (I’m sorry?) “Thought you lot would all have gone home!” What kind of health service would we have if “you lot” all did? What kind of country?
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