Poor people, dream big!

Byline: Atle Hetland

It was last Saturday at the 40th congress of the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP) in Orebro, Central Sweden, the Party Chairman and Prime Minister Stefan Lofven (61) said that poor people must dream big. It was fairness in party, politics and people's minds that had made it possible for 'someone like me', as he termed it, to reach high in life. It was big dreams and hard work, and growing up and living in a land at a time when poor people, too, were given opportunities; the institutionalised, structural hurdles were being dismantled.

Today, I write about the role of political parties, using SAP as an example. A few weeks ago, I told the story about an ordinary working class couple who were typical of those who built modern Sweden. Last week, I wrote about some ordinary working class men who became party leaders and PMs in the land before and after WWII. They didn't come from the top, but from amongst ordinary, working class people; they were given a chance to use their extraordinary talents, in a collective party culture.

Such stories are important to tell; they encourage people everywhere to dream big and to work hard. We are reminded that it is not the rich who build the land, nowhere; it is the masses with their labour, sweat and ideas. The rich should also be brought onboard, through innovation, taxation and direct support of government policies, investing in new technology and infrastructure, for that benefit ordinary people. The rich cannot be happy and free until all are free, Nelson Mandela and other real leaders taught us. This was true when the apartheid regime was ending in South Africa in the early 1990s. It is still true when the class differences make poor men and women not getting a fair share of the wealth and resources of their land, and not fair pay for their work. Then all suffer.

At the SAP congress in Sweden last weekend, PM Stefan Lofen spoke about this, stressing that not even in one of the world's most democratic and egalitarian lands, Sweden, and not anywhere in the world, is the class struggle over. Today, inequality is growing in many countries, and new groups, immigrants and refugees are often at the bottom. The PM drew attention to the importance of every woman and man having the right to decide how to live their lives, who to marry and love, what education to take, and so on. He stressed that there is no honour in denying a woman, or a man, to make his or her own decisions which...