AN OUTSIDE VIEW

One of the people on the course is a 25 year old Croatian who is studying Swedish so that he can do a Masters degree in International Relations in Helsinki. He has been in Britain for about half his life. I had a long conversation with him on the bus on the way to Stockholm. His analysis is worrying, as it roughly coincides with my own. His generation has just switched off from public affairs. He finds hardly any of his own British contemporaries that he can talk to about anything serious. In my own experience this isn't entirely true - I get to talk to young people at my old college when I go there, and things are not quite that bad. But they will mostly go into high-powered well paid jobs which is fine but it does nothing for the public realm as such. I thought it was just me being a miserable old fogey but seemingly it is not. I wish it was. If we have no insight into our problems, how are we going to get out of them? Of interest in this connection is the view of Sweden held by ...

I have been looking at the Guardian's comment pages over the last few days here . A few of my own responses have been copied into this blog. On the whole the comments to be found on the Guardian's discussion pages are thoughtful but neither the readers nor the authors of the original articles seem to go to the core of the issues they are talking about. This is strange because often the issues are at root simple and straightforward. Perhaps it is the starkness of the issues that makes people ignore basic principles and get immersed in the complexity of the details. Staying in a student hostel in Uppsala and the other activities I have been engaged in has given me the opportunity to engage with local people, many of them young. So many of the discussions I have had would just not be possible with British people of the same age and social group. IN my own circles there is a widespread refusal to look beneath the surface of things. People here seem to be more willing able to stand ...