These past couple of weeks …

These past couple of weeks have been increasingly hard for me. The power of the British state — mismanaged and authoritarian as it has been for so many decades now, with a direct lineage between this mismanagement and outcomes such as Brexit, pandemic graft, and the corrupt behaviours of much of its law-enforcement and too many of its security agencies — has proven too much for those I consider places of real worth and beautiful society. Where I am this minute, and where soon I shan’t be.

I have seen a new world here in Sweden: a world Britain had taught me not to even hope for. A world I had learnt not to expect as my birthright. A world which doesn’t use mental-health legislation as a criminal-justice and security enforcement tool, but treasures and values deeply the citizen and individual as the basic and yet utterly rich building-block of all society’s structures and ways of being, doing and seeing.

Yes. Everything Sweden clearly is becomes everything British politics and business have turned their backs on. Not because they don’t know its value: precisely because they do.

Next week, because I must, and it is right not to abuse Swedish hospitality, I will leave for my homeland. I will pick up medication I need, and then continue to pursue my projects as I might.

I have a gift and a talent, as my Catholic mother would say: I see the world as it really is. Everything. How the good happens and how the bad happens.

And I know now that there is much less bad in Sweden than in the UK.

And I also know that this is a choice, made deliberately and deliberatedly.

Sweden chooses good.

Britain chooses graft.

And more importantly, whilst there are good people everywhere, in Sweden they still have power to effect change for the better.

In the UK, meantime, the good lack the courage of their convictions. And so there is no going back.

For there might as well as be no good people in my homeland. Can you remember when they actually delivered? Permanently? With utility? With sensibility? With value? With compassion? With pride?

With efficiency?