London G20: Failed already?
The G20 summit is already a failure for Gordon Brown
Also In The News
|
Gavin Henson faces a race against time to be fit for the British Lions after scans revealed he had suffered a major ankle injury. |  |
Wednesday, 01, Apr 2009 09:00
The G20 summit is already a failure for Gordon Brown.
That seems a little harsh. The final communiqué has yet to be delivered. The world's leaders have yet to shake hands, let alone sit down together. There is still time for the prime minister to pull a $2 trillion rabbit out of the hat.
Yet all the signs suggest, as the final run-in to the summit begins, the unlimited high hopes trailed in January are failing to materialise.
It's an utterly painful, completely fundamental lesson about the perils of playing up expectations. The Road To the London Summit, a document published last month, was extraordinarily - and now, apparently, unrealistically - ambitious.
"Just as after the second world war visionary leaders laid the groundwork for 30 years of prosperity and growth, built on international economic cooperation, this crisis is also an opportunity," it concluded.
"The world's leading economies can come together and lay the foundations not just for a sustainable economic recovery, but also for a genuinely new era of international economic partnership - a global deal, in which all countries have a part to play and all will see the benefits."
Even earlier - on January 26th - the prime minister was getting raised eyebrows. His speech to the Foreign Press Association attracted a sceptical reaction from - well, the foreign press.
"We will succeed," Brown said, "but only if we leave yesterday's solutions behind and reshape our international institutions for the challenges of today and tomorrow."
Why should we care, it was asked, about British leadership on this issue? It's not as if the monetary and fiscal packages have had any effect. Nor did the Financial Services Authority do its job. They were, all in all, far from impressed.
Unfortunately it's not just the foreign press which has stayed at arm's length from Brown. Foreign leaders have adopted the same approach, which is why the current summit is in such trouble.
The Brown bounce has lost its elasticity. Praise for the prime minister in the aftermath of the initial crisis has become muted. Division, rather than devotion, is the order of the day.
Nowhere is this summed up more clearly than in debate over the fiscal stimulus. Such a bold measure was always likely to prove divisive, in spite of Barack Obama's enthusiastic endorsement. Alas, as Brown fought hard for international legitimisation of his domestic lending gamble, the French and Germans dug in their heels.
"I will not let anyone tell me that we must spend more money," Merkel said. This chancellor is not buying it, and doesn't seem in the least inclined to budge. Her attitude reflects that of much of Europe; a simple refusal to play ball risks undermining the summit's goals.
There will be a summit. There will be pages of agreement on the way forward. And we will see some really substantive measures set down.
Yet, despite the expected unanimity on a strong regulatory framework, it is not enough for the prime minister. Merely hosting a major international summit is not good enough.
It's a bitter, painful pill for the prime minister to swallow. But the truth is London 2009 will not be another Bretton Woods. In 60 years time it will not have the same landmark status as that epoch-defining summit. Instead final agreements on the new framework will have to wait for another meeting.
And this, above anything else, is why we can already write off this week's meeting in the G20. This summit hasn't taken place yet, but people are already starting to talk about the next meeting.
Yesterday Downing Street said it would "see merit" in a second meeting. "We view it very much as a process rather than an individual meeting - a process nearer to its beginning than at its end," the prime minister's spokesman said. There will be no final answers offered, in short. No final deal.
Like Icarus, the prime minister tried to fly too high. He craved a return to the statesmanlike stature enjoyed so briefly in the autumn. There was, back in January, a hope that the London summit would give him that opportunity. That proved elusive. He has overreached himself, and is now in the process of crashing down to earth.