The real lesson of a Swedish deportation protest

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space about the case of Elin Ersson. She is the young Swedish woman who caused adulatory headlines around the world when she stood up on an airplane and refused to sit down until an Afghan man was taken off the flight. Not that Ersson is some awful racist. Far from it, in her own eyes. Ms Ersson refused to be on the same place as the Afghan man because the Afghan man was being deported from Sweden and Ms Ersson wanted to stop this from happening. In her own words (filmed on her own phone, natch) the man was being sent to his ‘death’ because his country of origin is ‘hell’.

Anybody who has followed the extraordinary case of Swedish migration in recent years will know that you have to have done something very serious indeed to earn actual deportation from Sweden. So it was worth sitting through the period of adulation of Ms Ersson – from the likes of Caroline Lucas, Diane Abbott and the rest of the sisterhood – and seeing what her Afghan had actually done.