The distance between politicians and ordinary people is growing ever larger. This applies to immigration policy. It applies to the political elite’s capitulation to the EU. It applies to tax policy, climate policy, identity politics, as well as the Pride and woke madness that rides public administration like a nightmare.

Had referendums been held on these issues, policy would have been quite different. How is it possible that the people think one thing while politicians do the exact opposite? Norway formally ranks highest on all democracy indices. Is that democracy?

Why are ordinary people becoming steadily poorer while the state becomes steadily richer in oil-rich Norway? What is the point of a vast oil fund when those who work and toil never get to benefit from it?

Why does non-Western Muslim immigration continue unabated, despite costing hard-working taxpayers enormous sums, dividing the population, and destroying the country and the sense of community in the nation we once all loved?

Why is the public sector in Norway twice the size of the OECD average? And why are there twice as many people on welfare in Norway when the health of the Norwegian population is no worse than that of our neighbouring countries? It is better.

Why are politicians more concerned with taxing those who work and create value than with getting more welfare recipients—who may be wholly or partly capable of working—into employment? Why must elderly mothers lie in wet nappies in nursing homes while politicians in every small town in Norway build cultural centres costing billions?

Why are all parties, even the Progress Party (FrP), largely in agreement with this madness as soon as they attain office? How can they repeatedly promise voters one thing and do something entirely different once they enter government? Where has the real political opposition gone?

Are politicians stupid? Are they evil? Are they completely devoid of principles? What is wrong with them? What truly drives them? Have they created a system in which they no longer need to take account of the wishes and interests of the majority? How did Norway end up so badly off course?

A recent editorial in The Telegraph made something dawn on me. In connection with the Epstein inquiry in the UK, a remarkably revealing statement by a minister in Starmer’s government was quoted, shedding light on how politicians think, prioritise, and operate.

He said that the main theme recurring in every meeting of the British government was: whom can we tax so that we can pay benefits to others, implicitly: so that we can buy enough votes to be re-elected.

They are not evil. They are not stupid. It is about self-interest. About being re-elected. It is about acquiring a new voter base. It is about how the state’s tax revenues can be used to “buy” voters.

And it is about extracting as much as possible from the silent majority, which says little but works and toils for its daily bread and contributes tax revenues to the state. It is not about workers’ rights but about redistribution policy. It is not primarily about correcting social inequalities but about being re-elected.

As in Norway, more and more politicians in Britain have become career politicians. In fact, it is even worse in Norway than in the UK. The proportion with backgrounds solely in party work has risen sharply, from around 20 per cent in 2009 to nearly 60 per cent today. These are people who have chosen politics as a career path.

They have done so for various reasons. It may be a desire for power, influence, or attention, or simply because they are not suited to anything else. In Norway, we actually have the least educated politicians in the world. It has been documented.

We have the least educated ministers. That does not necessarily mean they are the most incompetent. But they often lack professional experience as well. The combination of limited work experience and low educational attainment is a poor starting point for good and fair policies that serve the majority population and the country’s long-term interests.

Whether we also have the politicians with the lowest integrity is another matter. The many conflicts-of-interest scandals and fraud cases in the Storting and government, and the fact that among all the nations of the world, almost only Norwegian politicians have been implicated in the Epstein scandal, may suggest as much. It points to a political culture in which self-interest is prominent.

The steadily increasing number of career politicians, party broilers, and party apparatchiks with no contact with the everyday lives of ordinary people has created a new political class and a new political culture. They have made politics into a livelihood. With few exceptions, they are not primarily driven by a desire to serve the community or a particular voter group. They are driven by a desire to serve themselves.

As politicians, they enjoy salaries, pension schemes, and perks they could not expect to receive in ordinary jobs. They set their own pay, and it keeps rising. They wield power, influence, and receive attention they would never have obtained in working life as warehouse clerks, customer-service representatives, or telemarketers.

The most important thing for them is to be re-elected. For many, it has become existential. To be re-elected, they must acquire as many voters as possible. They must also control the party nomination process in order to secure safe places on the electoral list.

They have secured control over the nomination process by granting themselves state party funding. In this way, they have made themselves independent of membership dues and party members. To block voter influence over nominations, they have even abolished the system that previously allowed voters to promote their preferred candidates through cumulative voting.

The parties, once controlled by their members, have become network parties. Through their social networks, party leaderships have secured control over party conferences and nomination committees, and thereby over who is nominated for the safe seats. They nominate themselves.

And in order to attract as many voters as possible, parties must appeal to as many people as possible. They must have something to offer. They do, through the state’s monopoly on taxation and their monopoly on redistributing tax revenues through the national budget.

The solution therefore becomes, as the minister in Starmer’s government inadvertently admitted, to find ever more people to tax or invent new taxes, so that they can pay benefits and provide welfare schemes or other advantages to ever more people and thereby secure new voter groups.

That is what redistribution policy is about: taxing those who work ever harder in order to provide benefits to other, new, more or less needy groups of voters who do not work, or work only partly, and who do not pay taxes but often account for an “overconsumption” of social services.

The recipients and winners in this redistribution circus are the exponentially growing group of non-Western Muslim welfare immigrants with low labour-force participation. They cost Norwegian taxpayers hundreds of billions of kroner every year. They often vote Labour (Ap), which has lost most of the working class to the Progress Party.

Next comes a steadily larger share of the younger generations, who have embraced climate and identity politics and prefer living on benefits to working. They often vote Red (Rødt), the Socialist Left Party (SV), and the Green Party (MDG). The far left has become less communist but more materially pragmatic. It abandoned the work ethic long ago. It wants the largest possible share of a cake that is steadily shrinking.

In addition comes the ever-growing number of employees in secure positions within the sheltered public sector. Fully 33 per cent of the workforce is now employed by the state. Probably the highest proportion in the world after North Korea. There, more and more people work less and less. Labour productivity in Norway’s public sector is far below the OECD average and declining sharply.

The losers are those who must finance the redistribution feast through toil, hard work, and tax contributions. Above all, it is the silent majority of ordinary wage earners who account for real value creation and the bulk of the country’s tax revenues.

And it is the pensioners. Those who built the country. Those lying in wet nappies in nursing homes and unable to speak for themselves. Those whom politicians and the bureaucracy conveniently stigmatise as the troublesome and costly “grey wave”.

And it is entrepreneurs and investors, who take personal risks to innovate and create growth and new jobs, but who are taxed so heavily that they have fled to Switzerland.

Yet while entrepreneurs and investors can flee to Switzerland, ordinary wage earners remain trapped in Norway’s redistribution vice. They experience themselves becoming relatively poorer while the state becomes steadily richer. They experience that politicians do not listen to them and that the distance between themselves and politicians continues to widen.

It widens because politicians do not really care about them. They care primarily about themselves. And they care about taxpayers’ money, which they can use to finance the immigration wave, petrol subsidies and electricity-subsidy schemes resulting from capitulation to the EU, the overconsumption of welfare benefits and Norway’s sickness-benefit scheme, which is twice as expensive, young people who choose benefits over work, and a political left that works in the media, academia, and an ever larger and ever less efficient public sector and lives off transfers.

Let this be clear: those who cannot work must be helped. But those who can work must work. Those who can work only partly must work partly. Otherwise they must manage on an absolute minimum. It cannot be more rewarding to live on benefits than to work. Everyone who can must help pull the load; otherwise the trust-based society and welfare state will collapse.

This is the cumulative paradox of the welfare state. Politicians outbid one another with ever more welfare schemes. New schemes are always added to existing ones. Old schemes are never removed. The sickness-benefit scheme is a good example. This is, of course, not sustainable.

And let this be clear as well: non-Western Muslim immigration is obviously not sustainable either. It represents the greatest social transformation in the country’s history and places a heavy burden on the majority population. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants do not qualify for asylum on political or humanitarian grounds. They are economic welfare migrants with very low labour-force participation. They cost the working population hundreds of billions of kroner every year—so much that no official institution dares calculate the figure.

And it should also be fairly self-evident that not everyone can work in the public sector. Public services are a good, but someone must finance them. Someone must create value and contribute tax revenues. The growth of Norway’s public sector, like immigration and welfare dependency, is not sustainable.

Politicians are in the process of sawing off the branch on which they sit. Through redistribution policy they seek to “buy” themselves new voters. But they are struggling. For the result of immigration policy, welfare dependency, and the growth of the public sector is that more and more people work less and less. That means a reduced pace of innovation and adaptability. It leads to lower value creation and weaker productivity. And it leads to lower tax revenues. The cake is going to become smaller.

Had it not been for transfers from the oil fund, we would have felt it much harder and much earlier. We would be where the UK, France, and Germany are today. Politicians keep the mainland economy’s budget deficit at bay by drawing from the oil fund. But the mechanism is the same as elsewhere in Europe. The discontent spreading among the working electorate is the same.

At some point it is going to explode in Norway, just as we are now seeing it begin to do in Britain and several other countries on the continent. The crime and sharia culture that accompany Muslim immigration are one thing. AI will contribute to higher productivity, but the pressure on the welfare state will intensify.

Then half the jobs will disappear. Then there will be even fewer people to tax. And there will be less to redistribute. If you wonder how politicians will adapt, the answer is obvious: they will drain the oil fund until it is empty. Probably only then will the placid Norwegians bring out the pitchforks.