The ins and the outs

IN 1965 SWEDEN’S Social Democratic Party embarked on the Million Programme, an ambitious plan to build a million new homes in a country of only 7.7m people. These homes had everything that good democratic citizens could want—all mod cons, easy access to public services and green spaces.

The government exceeded its target by 6,000, but in other respects the Million Programme went awry. Swedish workers quickly showed what they thought of the new homes—many of them high-rise blocks of flats on the edge of cities—by skedaddling at the first opportunity. In the 1980s the Million homes were filled by guest workers from the Balkans and Greece. Today, as the guest workers skedaddle in turn, they are being filled by refugees from the world’s trouble spots.