I know MMY & John Haglin are suggesting UK is descending into "hell" but the facts speak otherwise. Live 8 and the Make Poverty History and the UK's drive to cancel debt and double aid to Africa ETC surely makes the UK more like pioneers than desperados just out for themselves (hell).. If the Yagyas et al are hidden variables in the G8 meeting, we might expect something UNEXPECTLY POSITIVE to come out of them. Lets hopes so!!!!!!!!!!!
Summit will expose G8 fault lines By John Simpson BBC world affairs editor This is becoming quite a week. It began on Saturday, with vast numbers of people around the world demonstrating an idealism and a generosity regardless of national interests, and challenging the world's most powerful countries to do the same. It will continue at Gleneagles in Scotland on Wednesday, when the leaders of those countries meet at the G8 summit. Most of the world's most urgent problems, from world poverty and the manifest unfairness of international trade to the overpowering threat of climate change, are on the agenda. And, like some strange planetary conjunction, the announcement of the 2012 Olympics will be made on Wednesday, just as the G8 meeting is starting. Some British officials are nervous that if London beats Paris, President Jacques Chirac of France will be in wrecking mood at Gleneagles; though that seems a little unlikely. I hate to say it, but all the evidence of past summits like this, and I have been covering them since they started in the 1970s, is that the results never match the expectation. This time, though, things are a little different. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, anxious to try to rebuild some of the trust he has lost at home, has formed an ad hoc alliance with Live 8 organiser Bob Geldof to infuse some idealism into the G8 process. Live 8 ambush As a result, they have staged a kind of ambush for the other G8 leaders: fulfil the expectations of the millions who watched the Live 8 concerts around the world, they are saying, or be condemned as failures. The trouble is, self-interest is always the dominant force at these summits: like it or not, that is the way of the world The trouble is, self-interest is always the dominant force at these summits: like it or not, that is the way of the world. Some G8 countries - Germany, Italy and Canada, in particular - resent being railroaded into giving more aid to poorer countries, and particularly to Africa, which Mr Blair and his powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, have placed at the heart of this summit. But there are even more important fault lines. Most, if not quite all, the other leaders strongly resent President George W Bush's resistance to the Kyoto Agreement, and they will not have been altogether impressed by the concession he made in his interview with Britain's ITV News. In most parts of the developed world, global warming is now seen as the most pressing threat to mankind. So merely conceding that it is something "we've got to deal with", and accepting that human activity is "to some extent" to blame, is going to irritate more people than it appeases. And for Mr Bush to suggest that new technologies are the way to deal with the problem, rather than cutting the emissions which he now agrees are responsible, will only irritate them more. Resentment Altogether, this is the most contentious G8 summit of recent times. Behind the smiles and the hearty handshakes, there will be a great deal of residual anger. The wounds originally opened up by Mr Bush's invasion of Iraq have never entirely healed, and the resentment against the US for believing it was powerful enough to do without international support has never entirely gone away. Yet France and Germany are more angry with Mr Blair than they are with Mr Bush; and Mr Bush showed in his ITV interview that he is not planning to do his friend Tony any favours at Gleneagles. "I go to the G8 not really trying to make him look bad or good," Mr Bush said, "but I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country." It was not very diplomatic, considering how Mr Blair put his neck on the block for him. Still, Mr Blair can look after himself. He will not want Mr Bush to be isolated or humiliated, but he will want it to be clear who is responsible if there is no substantive deal over global warming. And he wants US help in his new crusade against the European Union's common agricultural policy. There, at least, Mr Bush was prepared to be forthcoming. Lip service He indicated he would be prepared to abandon the huge subsidies to American farmers if the Europeans scrapped the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Sounding good, or trying to, is about the best that will come out of this summit Of course he knows the CAP will never be entirely scrapped, and that anyway he will no longer be president if it is. But it sounded good. Sounding good, or trying to, is about the best that will come out of this summit. Like the doubling of America's aid to Africa, like the relief of debt for the poorest countries, these things are at their most impressive when expressed in headline terms. When you realise that American aid is still well below the internationally recommended level, and that large numbers of deserving countries are still excluded from debt relief, the phrases sound less fine. If the agreement on aid for Africa is clearly generous; if the statement on tackling global warming is outspoken and unambiguous; if there is a real undertaking to do something serious about the grotesquely selfish agricultural subsides which American and European farmers receive; then the Gleneagles summit will deserve to stand alongside the Marshall Plan for far-sighted, open-handed self- interest. But I'm not holding my breath. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! 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