David Cameron's plan to rebrand the Tories as the "Workers' party" has shocked a lot of people in Britain, but it comes – like many of his ideas – from the Swedish rightwing party the Moderates, and in that context makes perfect sense.

The Moderates are not a conservative party; they don't think things were better in the old days. If you're a Swede who is fearful and suspicious of the future you vote for the Social Democrats, or the right wing Sweden Democrats, a kind of Ukip equivalent though with neo-Nazi roots. The Moderates stand for business efficiency: low tax, competition, globalisation and, by implication, immigration. They are a party for Economist readers, or people who would like to be Economist readers, and one of their core beliefs is that the hard work of a few is subsidising the lifestyles of the many.

That is of course one of the central messages in the debate on welfare spending in the UK. Never mind that it is demonstrably untrue that most people on benefits live well; never mind that the vast majority of welfare recipients are pensioners – it is clear that a majority of the British people think that welfare recipients have chosen to do so.

The idea that there are workers who subsidise shirkers is very clear if you look at a political map of Sweden. The Moderates and the rightwing coalition generally are concentrated in the three urban areas where most of the population lives: the vast expanses of the interior vote solidly Social Democrat, Communist or sometimes Sweden Democrat. Those are also the areas where unemployment is highest and where the employment that does exist is overwhelmingly within the public sector.

"They should just shut down the whole countryside," my Swedish ex once said, and economically she was entirely justified. And it is also true, or at least universally believed, that public sector workers work a lot less hard than private sector ones, especially those in the export industries who are exposed to international competition.

This was true even 30 years ago when I was a worker in a small Swedish factory (and the union convenor). We were subcontractors for Volvo and worked damn hard all day, and knew that the unemployed didn't. But in those days the Moderates were a party of the toffs and the Social Democrats still thought of themselves as the party of the industrial working man.

But the industry has gone now, and the working men with it. If you work hard in Sweden today it is almost certainly at a desk and in a cosmopolitan city. The Social Democrats have become the party of women working in the public sector. They are identified, at least in Moderate propaganda, as the consumers of taxes while the workers in the private sector are seen as the people who pay for the whole show. In that sense they believe they are the workers – and they are also the Conservative voters.

That transformation took 30 or 40 years to become credible in Sweden. I don't think that British politics are directly comparable or even very similar. But if you want to know what Cameron and his political strategist Lynton Crosby think they are playing at, look across the North Sea.