THE G20 gave Gordon Brown the best press headlines he has ever had – or is ever likely to enjoy again. Even a Prime Minister whose Government is so closely attuned to the agenda set by the Daily Mail must have experienced an eye-watering moment when he saw its front page scream: “Gordon’s New World Order”. But then similar treatment was dealt out by their respective media to Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Hu Jintao. Each one had saved the world.
Mr Brown will not mind sharing the honours so long as the accolades are doled out abroad. It’s the British press from which he seeks the fillip needed to close the gap on the Tories.
For that, as much as anything actually achieved at the summit, is what it was about. In so far as the verdict delivered a modest boost in the polls, and the apparently easy relationship with the world’s most favourite politician of the moment was confirmed, it was a personal and political triumph for the Prime Minister. But, shorn of the hype delivered by the reporters locked up in Canary Wharf and force fed good news, the outcome does not look so triumphant for Mr Brown, and perhaps none the worse for that.
In spite of Mr Brown adopting his old bad habit of recycling already earmarked money as new for the sake of a nifty headline, the
$1 trillion agreement does not amount to a global fiscal stimulus of the sort that he and President Obama had been trailing in the run-up to the summit.
In that respect, they failed and those such as President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel succeeded in both a symbolic defeat for the Anglo-Saxon perpetrators of the great global crash and in laying down a more fundamental set of measures to ensure it does not happen again, although the effectiveness of action against tax havens remains to be proven, as Prem Sikka argues on pages 10-11.
Mr Brown and President Obama did not truly close tax havens, reopen world trade or achieve a new global fiscal stimulus, while Michelle was awarded her pedestal in the role model hall of fame. That this means no more – for now – billions tossed toward banks which fail to deliver their part of a flimsy bargain is good news. That so much energy went into pursuing this ultimately futile course instead of job creation programmes and green economic policies is bad, globally and nationally.
It was the development lobby, not the low-carbon lobby, which came out on top. It remains to be seen whether that old monetarist dinosaur the International Monetary Fund will be successfully reformed as advertised.
And it remains to be seen just what the freshly-named Financial Stability Board will do with its brief to create a “stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and its citizens”.
Just as we were once passengers and are now consumers, the G20 appears to have decided that we are now citizens of the great republic of Business – a republic that continues to collapse while more and more of its citizens become statistics in the unemployment logs.
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IS BARACK OBAMA beginning to sound just a bit like his predecessor on foreign policy? “Punishment” is not the kind of demand we have come to expect from a President who talks about extending an open hand. The announcement by Nato concerning Ukraine and Georgia, together with President Obama’s statement in Prague, suggests that Washington’s foreign policy with regard to Russia remains essentially the same as that of the administration of George W Bush.
Mr Obama’s pledge to see all nuclear weapons disposed of, however sincerely held and to be welcomed, is no different fromthe stated aims of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Nixon, Ford and Carter. And President Obama is continuing the installation of a US “defence” shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Barack Obama has encouraged global hope. It must be hoped that US global policy will not continue to be run by the Pentagon.
