Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

If you read William Atkinson’s Tory Diary yesterday you will have seen one thing: an Argumentum Ad Svenska.

It makes sense. The Nordics, on just about any measure, are the best in class so let us compare ourselves to them. More specifically, Atkinson argued that Badenoch needs to look at the Swedish centre-right government’s success in handling migration over the last two years. The problem though is this: what the author and his source (ex-Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson’s recent Telegraph column) quite understandably failed to see was that these measurements had been manipulated.

I fear both have fallen for the Swedish government’s attempt at engaging in a Rachel Reeves-esque credential massage. Their Prime Minister may be loudly declaring that they have achieved net emigration, but both their tax and statistics agencies disagree.

The key year in question 2023 is case in point. Whilst a typical year sees some 50,000 leave Sweden (of which 20,000 are Swedish born), 2023 saw 70,000 leave meaning that for the first time in a half-century Sweden was a net emigration nation. Was this down to successful government policy? No, not really. Rather the deciding factor was how emigration is counted.

Out of the 20,000 person increase in emigration, some 15,000 was achieved by counting the revocation of the residency permits of people who had already left the country over the previous decade. That is to say: people who had emigrated over the last decade were being counted in a single year’s figure, creating the appearance of net emigration where it did not exist.

This year a similar pattern has been observed. Sweden’s Migration Minister loudly championed that in the first half of this year the emigration trend continued, but the statistics made clear Sweden had not. Some 7,700 of 2024’s emigrants had not in fact emigrated in 2024 but again been counted as such by permit-checks. It’s a technical nuance but is a nuance needed to distinguish between reality and what we measure.

What we measure misses another thing – the composition of who is arriving and who is leaving matters just as much, if not more, than the total number. In Sweden’s case the number of Swedes who left Sweden grew from 18,951 in 2022 to 23,742, that 4,791 increase is of course remarkably similar to the 5,000 person residual left over after accounting for statistical revocations of historic residency permits.

When people say they want to reduce migration, it seems unlikely that they mean to achieve that with statistical changes and their own children leaving.

That compositional problem is indeed much the same as the UK’s. Whereas in the year prior to June 2016, 68.7 per cent of the 758,000 arrivals were from the EU, by December 2022 the equivalent figure was just 9.9 per cent of 1,170,000 arrivals. Migration then had not only essentially doubled but had moved from being from culturally similar high-income countries whose citizens were disproportionately net contributors with few dependents, to being the exact opposite, yet in headline figures they were treated as equivalents. The net emigration of these disproportionately skilled European Union nationals (135,000 in the year leading up to September 2022) had suppressed net migration headline figures.

Yesterday’s Tory Diary was indeed right, a credibility revolution on migration is needed – but Sweden is not where it will be found.

Ignoring the actual details of Sweden’s policies and focussing only on polling, one thing should be clear: their government isn’t credible. If a general election were held today two of the governing parties would be pushed below the 4% threshold that determines if they receive any seats at all. The Tidö parties more broadly would go from being 3 seats ahead to 53 seats behind (in a 349 seat Parliament).

Indeed, if anyone has benefitted from their credibility it’s the former Prime Minister the right-wing coalition defeated, Magdalena Andersson, who is maintaining a 20+ percentage point lead in preferred Prime Minister whilst the two right-wing options vie with ‘none of the above’ for 2nd place.

For something more concrete, though admittedly prone to selection effects, look at the closest thing there is to a midterm, the 2024 European Parliament election just a few months ago. The national-conservative Sweden Democrats were down 7pps from 2022’s general election, the liberal-conservative Moderates down 3, and the Liberals and Christian Democrats flat.

Personally, I like winners, and when I look at Sweden’s governing coalition, I don’t see that. Denmark’s similarly faltering government, elected two months after Sweden’s, can at least blame its failings on breaking Nordic bloc-politics with the unconventional format of social democrats, centrists, and national-liberals but who is there for Sweden’s government to blame?

Now of course the last Conservative government here could have done something similar to Sweden and done what Fraser had advocated historically; remove student numbers from the country’s immigration statistics, but changing data does not change reality and will only weaken a broader sense of social credibility long-term.

Indeed it’s rather like how when it comes to sentencing life does not mean life, or how visas stamped with no recourse to public funds does not in fact mean no recourse to public funds. People can, and will, point out the trickery, and the ‘coverup’ may be worse than the ‘crime’.

So long as people need what people need (housing and infrastructure) and so long as it is possible to overstay or shift between visas, strain will still be felt. It’s a lesson Canada, a country often pointed to for its exclusion of ‘temporary’ international student migration from its statistics, is finding out the hard-way as in the first 9 months of 2024 some 15,000 international students have applied for asylum, typically in clusters, and often the minute they arrive.

This is not to say that Fraser Nelson’s article was all wrong, indeed it was very much right about one-thing, Sweden’s government has made some highly innovative public policies on the issue of migration, though these solutions are in essence downwind of Denmark. What must be said though, is that if we are to do an Argumentum Ad Svenska we must know the context, and in this case Sweden’s context makes it clear copying it won’t work anymore than Rachel Reeves copying her book from Wikipedia did.

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