Palme´s last speech in 1985 to the United Nations was a call for a binding resolution to ban nuclear arms.
The basic tenet of his politics was to contribute to “making life as decent as possible for people”, as he said to David Frost in a BBC interview in 1969.
In these days of growing xenophobia and closing borders his speech on Christmas Day 1965 is worth reading, both in the Swedish and other European parliaments. Palme declared that seeing immigrants and refugees as individual human beings was crucial to their successful integration in society.
“Our commendable solidarity with the poor and oppressed of this world must be accompanied by internationalism in everyday life. That is how we can prove our ideals to be a living reality”.
That was common security in our daily lives.
Palme was an exceptional person, also at home as the brain behind a series of reforms which made Sweden more just and more aware of the rights of women, workers, and children. He reacted also as a citizen, not prime minister, when he returned a bureaucratic letter from the Stockholm municipality regarding the rules for the newly introduced preschools (which he had promoted himself) with the note: “Having read, but not understood”.
Therefore, today when we recall his death, it is important that we do not forget his life, what he stood for and achieved. Receiving the annual Olof Palme Prize in Stockholm last January, John Le Carré shared the fact that in the midst of the cold war, when nuclear arms and escalating propaganda threatened world peace, “even we in the Western spy circles felt that there was a voice missing. That voice was Olof Palme's.”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/bitter-lessons-olof-palmes-murder/