Maclayhem

A move to Sweden in 2012 Tatty and her family recently moved from Scotland to Sweden. Half-Swedish and half-English, Tatty grew up in the UK and works as a journalist. This is a journal of her first year in Sweden with her Scottish husband and four young children.

HERITAGE Maclayhem{ }

Maclayhem: Thoughts from the Motherland

by Tatty Maclay

It’s nice to think – and all too easy to believe when you live in rural Sweden and think nothing of leaving your doors unlocked 24/7 – that moving to this relative Utopia somehow affords you a safe harbour from the violence, natural disasters and political and economic instability that affect most of the rest of the world. As my husband remarked recently, living in small-town Sörmland ‘feels a bit like living in The Ark.’ But the recent rioting in Stockholm’s suburbs – only an hour from where we live – has been a stark reminder that nowhere is immune to the effects of unemployment, the widening gap between the rich and the poor and failed integration policies, among other things. To what extent the riots are a direct result of social exclusion and problems related to immigration, and how much they were simply caused by a small minority of bored, aggressive young men looking for an excuse for violence, is open to debate and not a question I can easily address in this column. (And though I may be a recent immigrant myself, I am very aware that – as a blonde, blue-eyed half-Swede – my immigrant experience doubtlessly differs hugely to that of, say, a Syrian refugee in Södertälje)

However, there are two things that have really struck me about these riots – in stark contrast to the 2011 London riots, which exploded under similar circumstances: the relatively restrained, measured media coverage, and the way the vast majority of residents of the affected areas immediately condemned the violence and vandalism and came together as parents and community groups to calm down, and clear up, the disturbances.

Except for a small minority, violence, Post-riot damage in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. Photo © Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix it happily seems, is still regarded as a very un-Swedish way of solving problems. It remains to be seen how far the more typically Swedish methods of discussion, co-operation and democracy will go in solving the root problems behind the uprisings.