ANDREW NEIL: The neatest thing Kemi may do is hop on a aircraft and see how Sweden is ruthlessly coping with its migration disaster

Sweden will offer migrants £25,000 each to move back to their home countries.

Yes, that’s right, Sweden. Hitherto the self-styled ‘humanitarian superpower’ which boasted of its ‘open heart’ towards refugees and welcomed them in greater numbers, relative to its population, than any other European nation.

Now it’s touting a policy – paying migrants to leave – once associated in this country with the far-Right BNP, a policy regarded as still too toxic even for Nigel Farage‘s Reform, whose appeal depends to a great extent on its anti-immigration credentials.

But it’s being introduced in Sweden with little fuss, just the latest in a list of measures rolled out in the past few years to crack down on immigration.

Sweden is an object lesson in what happens when uncontrolled immigration, legal or illegal, is allowed. The real enemies of immigration turn out to be those who insisted there should be no limits, thereby discrediting the very idea of immigration in the eyes of most voters and inviting an inevitable clampdown.

During the 2015 migration crisis Sweden took in nearly 163,000 asylum seekers, per capita more than anywhere else in Europe.

But what a difference a decade makes. It has just recorded its lowest number of asylum applications in a quarter of a century. Over the first 11 months of last year, that figure was down to under 9,000, of whom almost 5,000 voluntarily returned home.

Provisional figures even suggest Sweden now has net emigration for the first time since the 1960s – in other words it’s exporting more people than it’s importing.

Even if that’s likely to be a temporary phenomenon there is no question: Sweden’s days of mass immigration are over.

The general election of 2022 was the watershed. By then mass migration was synonymous in Swedish minds with gang-related murders by gun and bomb.

Yes, bombs – and the regular use of hand grenades. In one year, there were 149 gang-related bomb attacks which, as well as killing members of rival gangs, murdered or seriously maimed 28 innocent bystanders.

This is a form of gangster carnage unique to Sweden, which – before mass migration took hold – was one of Europe’s most peaceful, law-abiding countries.

Guns took their toll, too. In one 12-month period, there were 363 shootings resulting in 53 deaths. Sweden, which once had the lowest rate of gun violence in Europe, suddenly had the highest.

Sodertalje, a town of 75,000 south of Stockholm, had the same number of fatal killings as London. Bild, Germany’s biggest tabloid, called Sweden ‘Europe’s most dangerous country’. The insidious influence of the gangs even penetrated local government. In Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, the gangsters had enough clout with local officials to store weapons and drugs in council property. Welfare workers admitted they were too scared to report children at risk.

And children were indeed at risk. Migrant gangsters pioneered the use of so called ‘child soldiers’, sometimes as young as 11, most around 15, to carry out their killings, armed with vacuum-flask bombs and guns.

Sweden became notorious among its Nordic neighbours for exporting gang violence when, in only four months, 25 young Swedes – mainly from migrant families – were arrested in Denmark on suspected contract-killing or bombing missions.

Easter 2022 (that crucial election year) saw widespread, gang-inspired rioting in many Swedish towns and cities, with the police struggling to cope in the face of violent onslaughts.

By then every major political party had moved to the Right on immigration. Even the then ruling Centre-Left Social Democrats campaigned on ‘no more Somalitowns’. The Social Democrats won the most votes in the 2022 election. But it was the centre-Right Moderate Party which formed a new coalition government with two centrist parties and, more significantly, the support of the Radical-Right Sweden Democrats.

Once regarded by Sweden’s mainstream parties as beyond the pale and still not permitted to be a formal part of the new coalition, its fingerprints are all over Sweden’s new hard line on immigration and asylum seekers.

Sweden’s new maxim is simple: if you are not granted asylum, you must return home. Foreign criminals slated for deportation are now deprived of residence cards and denied the right to work.

Asylum-seeker rights have been restricted to the absolute minimum allowed by the European Union. Now asylum is only for the most convincing, not those who are really economic migrants.

The new emphasis is not on asylum rights but a weaker ‘subsidiary protection’ status. This must be renewed every 13 months and can last more than three years – but only as long as financial independence can be demonstrated.

Sweden has also reduced its refugee quota. Identity checks have been increased at the border. Asylum seekers will soon have to remain in transit centres for the duration of their processing period.

‘Poor moral conduct’ is to be new grounds for deportation. Family reunification rules have been tightened. And now migrants will have a financial inducement to leave which, for big families, could amount to a substantial sum.

It is significant that the opposition Social Democrats have not voted against a single one of these measures. There is a new Swedish consensus on immigration, very different from the old, which held sway for so long yet collapsed so rapidly.

The police, who at one stage looked like being overwhelmed by Sweden’s gang crisis, have been rearmed and retrained. They have also been helped by the widespread deployment of surveillance cameras and drones.

In the past, as gangland violence spread, most gang-related murders remained unsolved. Now 75 per cent of the killers are brought to justice.

There is also a renewed emphasis on integration. As Sweden opened its doors to newcomers, propelling its migrant population to over 20 per cent of the total, the Swedish government introduced the most generous programme of state support in the EU to sustain the incomers’ native languages and cultures. This is now seen as a mistake.

Those who want to settle in Sweden will soon be required to take language and integration tests when applying for citizenship. The fact they didn’t until now was regarded by some Swedes, for some reason, as a matter of pride.

They have learned the folly of that the hard way. Most gang leaders are now second-generation migrants, which underlines Sweden’s integration failures.

‘How are you going to be a Swedish citizen,’ asks migration minister Johan Forssell, ‘if you don’t know anything about Sweden or you can’t speak Swedish? I think it’s stupid. Most Swedes think it’s stupid.’

He’s also crystal clear that successful immigration and integration is a numbers game. ‘We will never be able to manage the enormous task of integration in the right way,’ he says bluntly, ‘if we continue to have such a high influx of immigrants every year. It’s impossible.’

This is something Britain’s rulers have still to realise. The last Tory government allowed net legal migration to rise to an unsustainable level of just short of one million a year and failed to stop migrants coming illegally across the Channel in small boats.

The new Labour Government has no stomach for anything Sweden is successfully pursuing.

It is content merely to mouth repeatedly its mantra about ‘smashing the people smuggling gangs’, an approach which is likely to be as successful as previous governments have been in smashing drug kingpins and their narcotics supply chains.

New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is desperately in need of some new ideas to give her clapped-out party a fresh start.

She could do worse than jump on the first available flight to Stockholm and learn from what the Swedes are doing on an issue – immigration and asylum seekers – which is not going away.

She might also like to reflect that Sweden has made far more progress on getting a grip on the matter in two years than Britain under her party managed in 14.

It has done so while remaining a member of the EU, following the European Convention on Human Rights and not reverting to Rwandan gimmicks.

Clearly the Swedes have much to teach us. She should not tarry. Otherwise, Nigel Farage will likely get there first.