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Lose your job in Denmark and you keep a good share of your pay for two years. Lose it here and you get a flat weekly sum for six months. This book asks how that gap opened, and the answer isn't mostly about how generous the Nordic welfare states are. It's about the organisations underneath them: unions that run unemployment funds, councils that can raise their own money, employers who sit across the table rather than outside it. It goes back to cooperative dairies and lockouts, and to Bevan taking hospitals off the councils.
Then it gets practical. It compares what the institutions really deliver, from adult literacy to a say between elections, and it's honest about where the Nordic countries have got things wrong. It maps who can raise and spend money in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast and the mayoralties, and ends with three modest reforms Britain could try and measure, rather than a wish to copy Sweden wholesale.
Lose your job in Denmark and you keep a good share of your pay for two years. Lose it here and you get a flat weekly sum for six months. This book asks how that gap opened, and the answer isn't mostly about how generous the Nordic welfare states are. It's about the organisations underneath them: unions that run unemployment funds, councils that can raise their own money, employers who sit across the table rather than outside it. It goes back to cooperative dairies and lockouts, and to Bevan taking hospitals off the councils.
Then it gets practical. It compares what the institutions really deliver, from adult literacy to a say between elections, and it's honest about where the Nordic countries have got things wrong. It maps who can raise and spend money in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast and the mayoralties, and ends with three modest reforms Britain could try and measure, rather than a wish to copy Sweden wholesale.