Safety First

Disclaimer! Just to be on the safe side:

‘This blog may contain explicit language, and I chain-smoked while I wrote it.’

Even before I came to Sweden, I’d already suspected something. My old landlord, Brian, had a Volvo 249 Estate parked in his driveway, and was always ready to tell you about its safety features. ‘Safest car in the world’, he’d begin, before going into excruciating technical detail about how the car qualified for this accolade.

‘Side-impact protection,’ he’d say, then added (in a confiding tone), ‘crumple zones, and seatbelt pre-tensioners.’

Then he’d pause and look with pride at the canary-coloured fortress on wheels.

‘Not to mention rubber bumpers,’ he’d add. ‘And no, you can’t test drive it.’

This was all wasted on me. I had neither the means to buy a car at the time, nor the legal permission to drive one. What’s more, I’d have been happy to own the most dangerous jalopy ever manufactured, just for the privilege of getting from A to B without having to suffer the indignity of public transport.

Roughly translated, all the jargon signified that the car was so safe that it even set the standard for the American authorities, which used it to test for safety developments on the other side.

The only problem was that it wasn’t quite so safe for non-Volvo drivers, since if a 240 had a head-on with another vehicle, the other car was a write-off and probably so were the passengers.

Well, nobody’s perfect, and this, of course, was another major incentive to invest in one of the most expensive family cars on the market.

So, when I started teaching in Sweden, it came as little surprise to me that Swedish inventors had been in the forefront of devising new ways of protecting mankind from the ravages of nature. Less predictable was the fact that I was required to include this information in my lessons.

Propaganda! I hear you exclaim with a smidgeon of outrage.

Well, partly, I guess. But it was included in a course on Swedish Culture and Society. What was truly weird, however, was that I (an ignorant Englishman) was asked to teach all this to Swedish students, who might reasonably have been expected to know more about the topic than myself.

When I asked what the hell was the point of ice-creams and eskimos, coals and Newcastle, not to mention grandmothers and eggs, I was told that this was so that students would then know how to speak about their country to enquiring strangers.

So yes. Propaganda, But by proxy, you could say.

The upshot was that, at least at the beginning, I learnt as much from these courses as the students did. For example, did you know that it was a Swede that invented the three-point seat belt? Nils Bohlin in 1959, since you ask. Working for Volvo, of course. No doubt, he and they gave themselves a good kick up their respective butts when somebody else beat them to the punch with the inertia reel.

But little deterred, Volvo went on to pioneer protection against side impact, roll-over and whiplash. And where Volvo led, Saab was rarely far behind.

So it must have been dismaying to find that people were still getting killed on the country’s roads, especially given that until the 1990s at least the majority of cars sold in Sweden were probably Swedish.

Then again, you can’t legislate fate and human idiocy out of the equation, of course.

Or can’t you. For that is exactly what the Swedish government has tried to do since 1997 with a programme called Nollvision.

 What this came down to was an intention to reduce the number of road accidents causing death or serious injury to zero. Which was ambitious, or to put it another way, an accident waiting to happen – unless you managed to come up with a way to engineer the stupidity gene out of the human race. Nonetheless in the twenty odd years since its inception, the policy has managed to reduce the number of serious casualties by over half, so it must have something going for it.

I never quite figured out how ‘ground zero’ was supposed to happen. But it did seem to coincide with the sudden appearance of roundabouts about the country. Strangely enough, there were hardly any in Sweden when I first arrived. As might have been expected, the introduction of this largely alien species resulted in a number of (relatively minor) traffic accidents until agreement had been reached on whether those on the roundabout or those entering had precedence.

Other tactics included the introduction of chicanes on the entrance to urban areas, which certainly made life more exciting if you approached at speed.

Outside towns, the major innovation appeared to be an ongoing experiment with faster roads. There is still no two-lane road all the way between the country’s two main cities. Originally the preference was for single lanes with a narrow hard shoulder to allow overtaking – if those driving more slowly really didn’t mind too much. More recently this gave way to what are called two-and-one ‘motorways’. In this case, there was regular alternation between single and dual carriageways. When one side of the road had two lanes, the other side didn’t. Clearly this succeeded in slowing traffic down. It also significantly increased what passes in Sweden for road rage; drivers would see an approaching dual section as a bull sees a red rag, and desperately try to get past as many vehicles before the extra carriageway disappeared.

The system also created bottlenecks at regular intervals. So now the traffic authorities have thrown in the towel on the major intercity routes and are spending billions doing what they should have done in the first place – installing two- or three-lane motorways.

And speed cameras. The first of these were installed at the beginning of the 90s and were soon to be found pretty much everywhere, with about two and a half thousand now scattered about the country. Interestingly enough, they don’t arouse the same feelings of moral outrage as they do in Britain. One reason may be that the placement seems to be based not so much on where accidents might happen, but rather than where fatalities have already occurred. This happy ad hoc approach basically pre-empts any objections to their existence, but seems to undermine somewhat the claims put forward by Nollvision. Whatever. Drivers here are sensible enough to regard the cameras as warning signs and react accordingly. And so they should, since they get adequate signs warning of the presence of cameras. Nothing sneaky about it, then. So let me go on record: I actually approve of speed cameras. Pipe and smoke it.

Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking that this Vision of Zero is a further reflection of a hubristic notion of human perfectibility that underlies much political thinking in Sweden – at least that species of thought that characterised the Social Democrats who determined so much of the Swedish mind-set and way of life for so long. And as you might expect of a nation that is not only preoccupied with total safety but convinced it can be achieved, the insurance sector is exceptionally large here.

In general people not only can insure against pretty much anything, but they also do. Admittedly, the Swedish were not pioneers in the field. The story goes that the Genoese were the first to come up with the idea, though I expect the Sicilian mafia were not far behind. But at the last count, besides the obligatory state insurance, we had car insurance, house insurance and if we had children and other pets, we would also probably have insurance for them. If we are travelling, our possessions are covered, and so are our bodies for everything from personal injury to abduction, repatriation and burial. It’s not so much that these options aren’t offered in other countries. It’s rather that here you take out one policy and a whole panoply of other policies are included automatically under the same umbrella.

I dare say you could, if you were prepared to cough up a hefty premium, insure against Armageddon, along with your football club being relegated. Which pretty much comes down to the same thing, even if both at the moment fall under the policy’s Act of God disclaimer.

Needless to say, given the suggested Cosa Nostra inspiration, the system isn’t perfect. Most of the few minor accidents we have experienced with our car have resulted in the poor vehicle being scrapped. For the insurance company simply refers us to the local panel beater, who then gives his estimate of the damage and informs the insurance people that the car isn’t worth repairing. So we’re reimbursed the second-had value of the car and more or less obliged to buy a new one. In the meantime, he flogs the scrapped car to a pal who restores it. Even when we got a ding in the car door, he insisted we needed a new one. I don’t think our panel beater has beaten a panel in his life.

That being said, for all I know, the rest of the world has followed suit.

With some forms of paranoid fears for public safety, however, it is Sweden that has lagged behind. Most notably, in the ‘health’ warnings that precede the showing of films and TV series.

Traditionally, Sweden has taken a liberal view of depictions of sex on the screen. Indeed, when I was growing up (in the last century), Swedish films were heavily associated with pornography. I guess this dates back to the fifties when Arne Mattsson’s One Summer of Happiness and Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika both included frank scenes of nudity and sex, neither of which are remotely prurient in their approach. These days both would be classed as arthouse, as are Vilgot Sjöman’s later multi-coloured and curious forays into sexual identity. Both between and after these films, a thriving pornographic industry did indeed exist, though whether the productions were more explicit than those of other countries, I have no means of judging. Of course.

My point, however, is that sex on screen has never been as taboo in Sweden as in Britain or the US. Violence, on the other hand, has been viewed as a much more pernicious influence. This, to me, makes perfect sense. The only real grounds for censorship, debatable as they may be, are that we are likely to be so influenced by what we see that we will seek to imitate it. Equally clearly, there is much more harm in acting like a film gangster (or cop) than there is in innocent acts of fornication.

Since the middle of the last century, however, the depiction of both sex and violence has become more and more graphic. So there is a case for warning the sensitive of what’s about to hit them and thus leave them the choice of turning off the TV or switching channels. For the less sensitive, on the other hand, such warnings simply act as titillating trailers for what is to come.

What bothers me, or rather what I find increasingly absurd, are the other things we are advised about before we watch. And here, I expect Sweden is simply following the lead set by the USA.

I mean what other country would have the sheer brass to warn viewers that they might be seriously offended by actors smoking, when only thirty years ago, it was almost de rigueur that the film lead would have a habit, and where a useful source of additional revenue was product placement of, inter alia, brands of cigarette.

Needless to say we’re also advised of any bad language and drug use. Tut-tut. Other fun trigger warnings include child abuse, animal cruelty (even though of course no real harm came to any of the animals used in the movie), self-harm/ suicide, eating disorders, kidnapping and abduction, death (!!), pregnancy/ childbirth/ miscarriage/ abortion, blood, mental illness, racism, various forms of –phobia, and something called ableism. (I confess. I had to look that one up.)

Personally I find it difficult to imagine watching a film without any of these. And if one exists, then I fail to see how it could be called entertaining. More importantly, since life itself contains all of these features in varying degrees, a viewer that wilfully ignored them must be expecting to live an existence as sanitised as an oxygen tent. And is due for a shock of an entirely different magnitude when faced by the fact that reality is in fact nasty, brutish and short.

Perhaps life itself should come with a health warning.

Frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn. After all, the content warnings are quite often the most entertaining part of the film. My own personal favourite is the one that came before an episode of Disney’s excellent Shogun. At the beginning of one episode we are warned that scenes of tsunami and earthquakes may be shocking to sensitive viewers. (Well it was a Disney production). The following opening scene consisted of a fairly graphic depiction of an act of seppuku (ie, self-harm), followed inevitably by an equally explicit decapitation. I guess they’d misplaced the warning. There’d been an earthquake in the previous episode. But still.

To sum up, Sweden has been in the forefront of making life as painless as possible for us, and now the rest of the world has caught up and in some ways overtaken us. With all the negative baggage that goes along with taking the risk out of existing on Planet Earth. No wonder we have climate-change deniers. I mean, if you take the view that if you refuse to accept that something exists, then it will suddenly disappear, you actually increase the risk of it’s happening to you. How difficult is that to understand? And, no. Ostriches do not really bury their heads in the sand. But human beings do so, too often. And when they don’t, they frequently fail to appreciate the difference between real safety and an illusory sense of security.

But that will be the subject of the next related blog. Sort of.

Which, you should be warned, some readers may find distressing.