“Labour have deserted the welfare state.”Labour are expected to win about 37 per cent of the vote on Monday, the same as four years ago. Depending on how the smaller left-wing parties do, that may not be enough to form a government. However silly it might have seemed only a few months ago, the prospect of Mr Hagen coming to power is no longer inconceivable.. Norway is awash with oil money, and the country has been running a budget surplus for three years The economy is in danger of overheating. Unemployment is under 4 per cent; property prices are exploding.The Labour Prime Minister, Thorbjoern Jagland, says the surplus must be saved for a rainy day, so that pensioners of the future can be paid when there is no more oil and gas left. The Progress Party, and many Norwegians, want a bit more jam today. “We are the new caretakers of the working class,” proclaims Mr Hoeglund.

“There are a lot of ordinary people in Norway, particularly old people, who are fed up with hearing again and again that we are one of the richest countries, but the Finance Minister says we have to save money for future pensioners.”The poorest they are certainly not. “We advocate a fairly restrictive immigration policy,” says Morten Hoeglund, a senior Progress Party adviser. “In that sense we are similar to Le Pen.”The xenophobia is served up, however, with a distinctly Norwegian flavour. While Mr Hagen preaches Thatcherite economics, including tax cuts all around, he manages to come through as the defender, not the enemy, of Norway’s welfare state.”We do not have to behave as if we were the poorest country in Europe when it comes to necessary services for our citizens,” he told journalists this week. These include the Sami (Lapp) minority, who, Mr Hagen argued during the campaign, should not be taught their own language at the state’s expense.Although there are very few foreigners indeed in Norway, Mr Hagen is deeply worried about them. We have to strike a balance between respect for the deceased and the fact that trains loaded with people are stuck on the line We are not unfeeling.”. China is set to close the book on socialist economic dogma today by abandoning state ownership of industry as the sacred doctrine of government policy.

President Jiang Zemin will this morning open the 15th Communist Party Congress with a speech paving the way for what could turn into the world’s biggest and most ambitious privatisation programme. There is just one proviso – no one is allowed to call it that. Mr Jiang will give the green light for most state-owned factories to turn themselves into shareholding or limited liability companies, or find other ways to survive in the market economy. The implications are real; last year almost half China’s state-owned enterprises were in the red, but in the brave new world of Chinese corporatisation, loss-making factories will no longer automatically be bailed out by the state, a decision which puts millions of jobs on the line.
Before the first years of the next century, China now plans to sell off, merge, lease out, or close down more than 300,000 state-owned enterprises.