Almost half of Kiruna's total debt is tied up in the bathhouse, where costs have exploded.
Newspaper!!
"This week's column in Folkbladet:
In a unique decision, the government overrules Kiruna municipality and decides that the Australian company Talga should be allowed to start a graphite mine in Vittangi.
When the minister responsible, Ebba Busch, talks about the people of Kiruna ‘getting jobs’, she does not know what she is talking about. Kiruna has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, with more than a thousand job vacancies. The housing shortage in Kiruna is also enormous, and the municipality is struggling with the high costs of moving the town centre.
If the mine goes ahead, it will be a ‘fly in, fly out’ with workers who will not live and pay municipal tax in the municipality. What will be left for the municipality when the mine has done its work, a hole in the ground and a smell of diesel?
When Kiruna's municipal councillor Mats Taaveniku (S) says that the government sees Norrland as a colony, one can only agree.
Imagine if it had been a mine in the Stockholm suburb of Täby, would the government have run over the municipality? Of course not, the government's core voters live there.
We have a Stockholm government, not a single minister is from northern Sweden.
The Moderates, like the Liberals, are distinctly Stockholm parties. They have their own ‘beard’ of power holders who hire and appoint each other as governors and national security advisors. In Stockholm, they live in symbiosis with Timbro and big business.
They don't care about northern Sweden, unless it's about delivering cheap electricity or raw materials for the benefit and profit of the head offices in Stockholm.
The government does not seem to have realised the enormous opportunities that the green transition can provide in northern Sweden. They are neglecting the jobs and investments of the future. Instead of investing in strong communities, they are pursuing a policy of exploitation, a colonial view of the north.
The opposite of the government's passivity and arrogance would be an active and long-term policy to capitalise on opportunities. Municipalities with large investments need help from the state.
Sweden has an internationally unique low mineral tax. While Finland introduces a mining tax, minerals are effectively free for mining companies in Sweden. The tax should be raised substantially and the refund should go to the region concerned. The same should also apply to wind and hydro power.
Environmental requirements for the mining industry must be tightened, and sensitive nature and reindeer husbandry must be protected.
The state should provide better investment support for building new homes in municipalities such as Kiruna, but instead the government is abolishing the existing support.
Healthcare and other welfare services are being forced to make cuts, which has affected Malmfälten and Norrbotten in particular. For the government, it is more important to reduce taxes for their friends in Stockholm, those who have high incomes and own venture capital companies. It should be the other way round.
Northern Sweden has a neglected railway; north of Umeå, the single-track main line follows a route from the 19th century, and towns like Skellefteå and Piteå lack passenger services.
Yet the right-wingers put the brakes on railway expansion in the north as soon as they come to power.
Building a modern coastal railway in upper Norrland and double tracks on the Ore Line is absolutely necessary, not least for the mining industry.
The new jobs that can be created in the north with the production of green fuels, the mining of rare minerals and the electrification of steel production and mines are based on the realisation of the green transition.
This is also what climate change demands. But instead, the government is slowing down the green transition, in Sweden and the EU.
This makes investors hesitate, and jobs end up elsewhere.
We need a government for all of Sweden."
Do any of you understand that? Or are the minds up there partly contaminated by propaganda?
