Politics are making me move.

I'm moving apartment in a couple of months, from rental 'till one I shall own. I can't say that I really want to, but the government have changed the law on purely ideological grounds.

As things stand, rents in Sweden are extremely low; they've been kept that way by apartment blocks owned by the local councils, which have been run at cost price. I think that it's one of the reasons that living standards have been so high in Sweden; the cost of owning a home runs at an average of 30% of a households income.

Now a law has been passed obliging these apartments to be run for profit; no improvements can be made with-out justifying them on grounds of increased income. Rents in private apartments will no longer be set against these rents plus a determined mark-up.

So everything will spiral.

The justification being used is that not enough building is going on, but that's hardly strange in today's strangled economic conditions.

It makes me sad. In Ireland, working for the county council, there was no way that I could have afforded a home of my own, I'd have had to share a fairly small apartment, and that would have consumed probably 65-70% of my income. Here, I've had a lovely apartment, and had most of my income over.

Why change this? It worked. I would have thought that it was worth protecting, more important than the possibilty of a small group of people making large sums of money.