Tabloids: why is Sweden better at coping with snow than Britain?

By Bagehot

CALL it the pub bore test. Every year or two, it snows in Britain hard enough to leave a covering of the stuff in unusual places like London or southern England—usually not for very long. Cars and trains get stuck, airports close, and British newspaper editors face a simple test. Will they, or will they not, dust off that old journalistic stand-by: the article asking why-oh-why is Britain so bad at cold weather compared to places like Siberia, Sweden or Canada?

It requires a pretty impressive level of laziness and/or cynicism to pose that question in print. A squint at the map, after all, reveals a swathe of countries at the top (and bottom) of the world where it snows a lot every year, and it duly makes sense to spend a lot of money on snowploughs, heated runways and the like. Around the middle of the globe, there are a bunch of rather hot countries where buying a snowplough would be silly. In between (where Britain lies, and this is a clue), are countries where it snows just enough to make it hard to know how much to invest in winter kit.