British Perspective on Norwegian Election 2014 (Storting , Valget 2014)

Rather than going straight to the recycling bin with the election magazine from FrP (progress party, "far " right here in Norway) I decided to read it.

I have met quite a lot of Frp members here and they are a little split into two camps: small business bourgeois types and generally anyone who doesn't like taxes and tolls on roads as a way of financing an egalitarian society.

In Britain then they correspond to a far earlier epoch, the post war middle middle class who were fed up with rationing and high taxation. That is where the 'Grocer's Daughter' and her hand bag home economics came from, Magaret Thatcher, the witch whose policies allowed British industry to close down or move to China.

In the last election FrP had an aggressive agenda and both them and the conservative Høyre rattled sabres about working conditions being unsustainable and damaging business. Oil barell prives went up and we got guaranteed summer holiday of three weeks. The right were pandering to their pay masters in business and the population returned the red-greens with a sustained majority.

Now the blue side of the house have not just tamed their message, they have returned with a liberal and largely socialist agenda.  Spend more money! Build infrastructure!

This is a bit of an ananthema for uk conservatives. We had almost twenty years of save and cut back, which was a bit illusionary because public spending shifted to infrastructure mostly in tory counties, metrics beaurocracy in the nhs and education and paying the dole for people trapped in industrial ghost towns.

The norsk labour party has rendered the old style blue rinse parties, with the strings pulled only by the bourgieos, unelectable because the economy can support the liberal labour laws. People here know there is no excuse for lower pay, short term contracts and the bosses determining your workng hours. There is little need to pander to businesses in the uk either but that is where the balance of power lies. Now enter new whiter than white blue parties with a personal liberalising message of road building, choice of school and legal jet ski driving.

They will face legal and interrnational resistance to forcing the oil fund, the state pension investment fund, into investing in road projects which will be motorist toll free. They will have resistance to privatisation in the nhs here. They will face large problems with free school choice and the general grading of primary school kids, mainly because the two a large new beaurocratic load and benefit only a minority while actually threatening average quality of schooling by being devisive, leading to dump schools and stigmatisation for pupils and teaching staff. With norwegians hate of commuting, it is only the few right wing parents who will choose this to begin
Now they open the door for a wider working class support as people percieve they have more money in their pockets and team leader and lower management start to be lured into the benefits for them of privatisation.  So it really isnt the first blue governemnet anyone has to worry about, apart from the economists. It is the second possible term which would really make negative changes to the workers lot .