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Tragedy at Trollhättan

The first assumptions following yesterday's school murders at Trolhättan were that the perpetrator was a Muslim. That is in itself significant and indicates the prevailing level of mistrust. It now turns out, however, that the assailant was a weird young man with extreme right-wing interests. Whether he was sane or not, he looks like another in the Breivik mould.

Had it been a Muslim, it would have led to a stepping-up of the wanton unpleasantness that identifiable Muslims have to put up with. That it was not, is, to put it mildly, unhelpful to the immigration debate currently in progress in Sweden. Either way, it is an indication that there is a limit to the numbers of newcomers a community can absorb before the tensions become too great, and that the greater the cultural differences between newcomer and host, the smaller the number that can be absorbed. This is a simple and obvious fact that politicians are ignoring.

The numbers flowing in as a result of the current Swedish open-door policy are overloading the authorities and their arrangements for absorbing newcomers. The costs are sucking resources from the very services for which people are content to pay the highest taxes in the world. High taxes and cut-down services lead to discontent.

Discontent is also fed by the very obvious failure to integrate amongst many of the large number of immigrants who have arrived in Sweden over the past twenty years, the rates of gun and sexual crimes, and the known arrival of ISIS operatives, combined with the soft treatment given to returning "Swedish" members of ISIS, all of whom should be on remand in custody, pending investigation for suspected war crimes.

Thus, yesterday's events are the appalling tip of an iceberg of discontent. Madness begets madness. There are always a few lunatics and paranoiacs who brood for a while and then surface and do something terrible.

It does not get the politicians off the hook for failing to deal with a serious issue.

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