No politician wants to take responsibility for this year’s bonfire chaos – Gefle Dagblad

1.

Confusing fire ban

Is it too much to ask to see a May bonfire in Gävle? I asked that question in a column about this time last year.

If you had a car, there were still plenty of bonfires to visit in the immediate area. Last year, for example, we had a very nice Valborg fair evening in Söderfors, where something as untimely as fireworks was even offered.

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It was a perfect Valborg with choir singing in the English park by the temple, hot dogs for the fire on Ankarbacken and not a disturbing swan as far as you could see.

But now it seems that even the bonfires of the smaller towns are under threat. The new, highly unclear rules on burning garden waste mean that this tradition is under threat.

GD wrote this week, for example, about Åbyggeby village association, which does not have the resources to pay the administrative fee of SEK 1,311 that is charged by the municipality to grant exemptions for burning.

The threat to the spring fires is a typical case of a contemporary issue that arouses anger but for which no one takes responsibility. The politicians don’t want to be involved in such a decision, point at each other or even call for arson on social media.

No one takes responsibility for and stands up for a decision. Thus, the anger also reminds a little of the vague irritation you feel at having been sneezed at in the spring of this year. There is no one to direct this criticism against. You can swear when you open SMHI’s app once again in disappointment – but there is no one who decides the weather.

But unlike the weather, somewhere a decision has been made about firing which has then been interpreted in several layers in a bureaucracy’s equivalent of the whispering game. Politics has become so complex that the politicians themselves do not even understand it. Or pretend they don’t understand when voters bang angrily on the door.

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2.

The residents of Gävle have felt like winners again

Could what looked like a disaster for Gävle last spring actually be one blessing in disguiseas they say in English?

Sasse and the other colleagues at Sporten get to analyze what it means for Brynäs IF purely sportingly, and how the year in the Hockeyallsvenskan has taken a toll on the club, but for Gävle as a city and for us Gävle residents, the year has given the opportunity for a new kindling in the relationship now that the team directly comeback in the SHL.

Because during the autumn and spring we got to experience what it’s like to be a winner. The winnings have been stacked high and you haven’t had a stomach ache every time the table has been updated. In the city where you have headwinds from all directions, it has sometimes even felt like there has been a slight tailwind.

It’s like an old marriage. Everything has become idle and lead, but then the discord leads to an inevitable separation which means that you start to miss each other after all.

Brynäs IF and Gävleborna have been sitting and grumbling at each other like a bickering couple in a Strindberg play. It has been dreamed of ancient days. Now we have felt the cold outside the SHL hearth, and the expectations can perhaps take a more realistic shape when Brynäs IF becomes an SHL team again.

Or a silver mountain is enough for the city to get gold fever again.

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3.

The bean can become like the Candy Factory

We have had to get used to the gloomy headlines about coastal fishing. If it’s not trawlers that devour everything or cormorants that eat the fish, it is – as this week’s series of articles in GD showed – bureaucracy that threatens the Gävle cultural heritage with smoked ducklings on Stortorget.

Now it is Bönan, Engesberg and Utvalnäs that the Norwegian Sea and Water Authority wants to remove from the list of national interests for professional fishermen.

A deletion whose consequences are as much symbolic as concrete.

The national interest means that consideration must be given to fishing when housing and more are planned. It is nevertheless pleasing that efforts are being gathered locally to prevent these places from disappearing from the list. But if that happens: What prevents Gävle municipality from prioritizing small-scale coastal fishing on its own, national interest or not, over further development with housing?

What little is left of the coastal fishing, might be added. The bean risks becoming like fishing’s equivalent of the candy factory at Brynäs, which is built on a foundation of industrial cultural heritage.

Some symbolic artefacts from the time of fishing that are left behind to give a distinctive character among the luxury villas.

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