Tuesday’s decision by the Swedish government to shut the doors to almost all refugee settlement brought the deputy prime minister to the verge of tears as she announced it. This wasn’t cheap emotion: it represents a massive and irreversible climbdown from the belief that Sweden alone in Europe, almost alone in the world, could offer refuge to anyone who truly deserved it.

Swedish politicians, whether left or right, have a frightening capacity to focus on the map while they ignore the ground beneath their feet. The Green’s leader, Åsa Romsom, the same person who nearly wept as she announced the end of the generous asylum policy, tweeted as her immediate reaction to the Paris bombs last week that the atrocity “would make the work of the environment conference more difficult”, which is undoubtedly true so far as it goes, but at the same time deserves a Little Red Book award for criminal irrelevance.

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The unprecedented scale and speed of the autumn’s refugee crisis has forced even the Swedish political class to acknowledge that the ground beneath its feet has shifted forever. There is simply no more money, and no more housing, for everyone who wants to come, and for everyone who was entitled to do so under the old rules.

The refugees have been spread all over the country, except in Stockholm, which has contributed to the backlash. A friend of mine lives in a small town in the centre of Sweden, with a population of 10,000 – which now has 1,000 additional refugees to feed and house. Their children must be educated. Jobs must be found for them. It’s really not easy to see how this will happen.

The scale of immigration to Sweden in the last decades has been huge. What was 30 years ago one of the most homogeneous nations in Europe now has a population in which nearly one in five is of immigrant descent, and most of those are visibly different.

Almost all of this growth came as a result of refugee immigration, first from the Iran-Iraq war, then from the Bosnian wars, and subsequently from Somalia as well. It has gone better than anyone might have expected, but not without friction. Poor areas have become ghettoised. Some have become homes to gang violence: there have been 40 unsolved gang murders in Sweden in the last four years. That figure would have been unthinkable in the high noon of social democracy. It was horribly shocking earlier this year when three young people of Middle Eastern extraction were shot dead in a car park about 500m from the council flat where I once lived with my family. There has also been violence from ethnic Swedes: three racist mass murderers have gone on sprees since 1990, most recently in the hideous murders in Trollhättan in September.

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While this went on, the nationalist and reactionary Sweden Democrat party has grown from a tiny groupuscule with clear neo-Nazi roots first to get into parliament, and then to hold the balance of power as a result of all this. But all the other parties have united in their refusal to bend to the Sweden Democrats’ demands, or even to acknowledge their existence. Not only was the political class in Stockholm in complete denial about the Sweden Democrats for decades but the present government is in power only because all parties in the centre-right opposition have refused to acknowledge that, arithmetically, the Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power and could topple any government of either left or right if the others would only vote with them.

The measures that have been announced will not in themselves be enough to stem the flow of refugees. Passport controls at the border, and time-limited visas will not be brought in until next year. Until then the attractions of Sweden will be even greater. But they do mark a historic change in Swedish political sentiment, such as only happens every 20 or 30 years. In six months’ time it will be impossible to find any prominent Swedish politician who ever believed in last week’s policy. The dream of Europe as a sanctuary is dead.