One reason why there is an IKEA in every town in the Western world is this one: Swedish collective bargaining arrangements have no mechanism for ‘saving jobs’. The Swedish left have, in large part, embraced Schumpeter’s principle of creative destruction.

When unions strike, and Sweden is still a heavily unionised country, the unions do not initiate industrial action to save jobs. They strike to do one of two things: increase wages, or force bad companies into administration or bankruptcy. The latter aim is regardless of whether jobs will be lost or not.

The principle is clear. Nordic unionism is all about preserving a high-tech, advanced manufacturing and service sector. To do that capital can’t be locked into inefficient and exploitative companies. It is better for workers to be retrained than to do menial and soul-crushing menial work.

This is key when you look at the response of both the unionists and the yessers over the steel industry in this country. Both sides engage in a delusional game of whack-a-mole with each other to come up with who is the most nationalising and protectionist side.

The British left have never really learned the lesson, and still cling to outmoded dogma about centralisation. Another example of this is the hankering for rent controls. It’s a case of ”if it moves, nationalise it or centralise it”. Public control is, per default, assumed to be better and more efficient. If only rents were state controlled, all would be fine.

Evidence points overwhelmingly to the contrary. Rent controls are a band-aid solution applied to the demand-side, when the reason why rent-controls are thought to be needed is exclusively on the supply side. Rents go up because there is a huge demand and a lack of supply. To tackle high rents, the solution is to build more housing. Places like Stockholm show that if you prevent rents from rising, the only thing that happens is that rental contracts move into the black market.

Despite rent-controls, because house building is severely depressed in cities like Stockholm and Gothenburg, the queues are now decades long, and the way to get a flat in those cities is to employ dodgy real estate agents who peddle contract-switching for fees of £100k or more. Often a lot more. Since contract switching is illegal, you could spend all that money, and then be evicted for it. But, since rent controls keep the supply to an absolute minimum, and because demand is so high, lots of people still pay the extreme fees for a dodgy flat.

The answer to a lot of our problems is to import the good bits of the Nordic model, but leave the bad bits be. For the unions to adopt the Schumpeter Principles is a start, so we don’t have this contest of nationalisation and protectionism to lock resources into bad companies. But let’s leave rent-controls at the door.