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G8: Promises, promises...

• Newsnight
• 6 Jun 07, 07:52 PM

From Newsnight's Economics Editor at the G8 Summit. Watch her report here.

They say G8 summits are about the numbers. And this one is no exception. We've got 16,000 police, 11,000 soldiers, two minesweepers, a dozen AWAC planes and I don't know how many helicopters - all dedicated to protect the leaders of the seven largest rich countries in the world (plus Russia). If you watch Newsnight tonight you'll see my heroic efforts to get as close as possible to where the action is. Which is not very close at all.

It's all a long way from 1974, when the US invited a handful of finance officials for a chat in the White House library. That "library group" was the precursor to the G8. And I have a strong suspicion that they got more things done.

Of course that's not the official line. The official line is that you can get more business done with 8 leaders sitting in a room for a few hours than you can in months of lower level diplo-chat. But that's only half-right. It's true that the prospect of having such a meeting - and the world and his dog waiting outside to hear the results - means that any leader with voters to worry about will call a meeting of his staff about 3 months before aforesaid meeting to ask them what the "deliverables" are going to be. Then the staff - in the case of the G8, the worthy Sherpahs, devote several months of diplo-chat to finding stuff for their bosses to announce (the deliverables).

This system can work fairly well - with the right leaders and the right issue. The right leaders means people who are either very dedicated to a given cause, or need to get re-elected quite soon, or both. And the right issue is one where either the G8 can deliver on their promises immediately - or give the task to someone else. Because the G8 is an institution that's designed to produce deliverables. It's not designed to actually deliver. Consider what happened two years ago. Say what you like about (and who doesn't?) they DID deliver on most of their promises to write down African country debt. Why? Because it was the IMF and the World Bank that actually had to do it.

Where the promises involved individual governments translating their promises into aid budgets, year after year - they weren't kept. Or many of them weren't kept. The reckons that governments have stuck by only 65% of the commitments at Gleneagles. Perhaps Chancellor Merkel should look on the bright side - if she doesn't get any big new commitments from the heads at this year's summit, there will be fewer promises leftover for leaders not to keep.

Join the 'How gr8 is the G8' debate here.