And as the writer of the article, obviously I disagree with “Git” above. If you can’t see how some people might not have a *choice* about committing crime, you haven’t been poor enough. A statement like “the ONLY cause is a criminal” doesn’t cover the huge pressures which influence people to make those choices, and I can’t get behind that. Sure, some do it because they’ve no conscience or just want to steal stuff. I don’t believe a responsible government labels everyone in terms that black and white.

Iceland has a population of just over 310,000 people, just slightly more than the city of Southampton – very easy to try out new ideas.

This makes is a lot easier to manage than a country with 70 million.

Well, one difference between women and men is that is usually women that are left to do care work often for free, in fact this work is often not recognized as such. When someone spends their time caring for others it tends to change their outlook. Contrast this with the extreme individualist gung-ho Patrick Bateman-esque attitude of the boardroom and that type of “professional” work and there’s a difference there I think.

Yep, the entire population of Iceland fits in a single (small) phonebook – and are listed in order of first name! :D Fair play to them, I dare say they were in a situation where they had little to lose by starting from scratch.

Yes, the EU thing definitely is a bit of a clunker as one of the big discussions has been Iceland’s possible entry into the EU.

But I think that Johanna is a good thing, on balance, from what I can see. Even just from a very basic stance of women’s-higher level-visibility-in-politics on the left.

The Mail has warbled on about her as “a former air hostess” somewhat predictably.

The first paragraph of that “excellent article” says that Iceland is a member of the European Union. Iceland is not in the EU and has only recently applied to join the EU.

I doubt the accuracy of that article if they can’t even get basic fact checking right.

Thank you for this!

While she didn’t choose it, she certainly seems to be defending it hard now (as in the article linked to towards the bottom), but that’s good to know her initial stance. Also, thank you for the info on Icelanders using first names even for formal situations, I had no idea!