THE two million people in Britain officially without a job and wanting one must be marvelling in bewilderment at the hype surrounding the G20 summit which is set to put the economic world to rights, if some capitals, London at the forefront, are to be believed. Many of the 600,000 leaving school this summer will have a regrettable abundance of time on their hands in which to study the entrails of what the summit really meant and what it achieved as they search in vain for that first job.
Rarely has the personalisation of politics and its consequent dumbing down of the issues been portrayed on such a global scale by the media and government spin-doctors. Everybody wants to play with Barack, of course. Gordon wants him to be his new best mate. But Nicolas and Angela don’t want to play with Gordon and they want to lead Barack away from being led astray. The bad boys in Russia and China haven’t been allowed to join the gang yet, but when they do, then there’ll be trouble. But perhaps this actually accurately reflects the reality of the event.
In spite of comparisons, drizzled out by Downing Street, this will be no Bretton Woods, which started the reversal of the crashed world economy in the 1930s only after protracted negotiations on a genuinely bold agenda. The one-day summit on April 2 will not even be supported by a linked-up bureaucracy dedicated to following through and enforcing any decisions that might be made.
Both the British Prime Minister and the American President want to come away with the widest possible international backing for the “fiscal stimulus” driven plans, though Mr Brown has had the rug tugged a bit under his feet by the calculated intervention of the Bank of England’s Mervyn King in a flamboyantly defiant outing for the bank’s independence so generously bestowed by one Gordon Brown.
Mr King’s scepticism about the wisdom, or even the feasibility, of throwing another mega-wodge of cash at the problem is spreading. Like France and Germany, most of the protestors who will gather outside the G20 and those about to join the jobless two million, people are questioning whether those attempting to guide the debate in London are even on the right agenda.
Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel – to boil their respective cultures, politics, governments and coalitions, formal and informal, into their dramatis personae – prefer a global agreement with a different diagnosis, one that requires prevention rather than cure. In simplified terms, they want a crackdown on hedge funds and all the other labyrinthine channels of greed which caused the global implosion in the first place rather than a restoration of business as usual sometime down the line. Number 10 is holding the line that supervision of financial institutions should remain “a national competence” when it is, and will remain, a national incompetence against a quintessentially international money market.
Much of the appropriate agenda will be written not on the plush notepads within a sterile security island in Canary Wharf, but on the banners of the protestors as they march through the streets of the City of London. A jobs creation programme, for example, should be seen as an emergency priority just as other threats to national security are.
Similarly, if anything is to be given a fiscal stimulus, should it not be a package that greens the economy rather than greases the palms of bankers? An internationally co-ordinated crackdown on tax havens would go some way towards justifying the £7 billion cost of the London extravaganza.
And if this Government and others want to talk about strengthening and reforming the International Monetary Fund, why not make it matter and give it powers to take punitive action against reckless and irresponsible financial institutions?
Any financial stimulus which emerges from the G20 will be akin to plastering over a pin-prick compared to the social cost of allowing a generation of jobless to rot without hope for want of a comprehensive job creation package and a Government that is not too blind, too blinkered by redundant ideology or just too timid, to see and do the obvious.
