G20 Summit

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 8th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this debate could and perhaps should have taken place a little earlier—ahead of the G20 meeting—but at least we now have the benefit of knowing the outcome of the meeting, and can make some assessment of it. It has been most excellently introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, whose rotation off the chairmanship of the International Relations Committee is deeply regretted by all its members, myself included.

Our letter to the Prime Minister noted that the G20 was falling short of its earlier promise when it helped to handle the aftermath of the world financial crisis in 2007-09. Has the Osaka meeting changed that judgment? I do not think it has. It is still falling short of its ability to deal with a whole range of issues which are crying out for effective collective action—including, most prominently, trade policy and climate change—but that does not mean that we could do without the G20. To coin a phrase, if it did not exist, we would need to invent it, bringing together as it does the countries with 80% of the global economy, and bridging the divide between fully industrialised countries and those that are still developing. The G7, which has only industrialised countries, is not a substitute for that.

We should have no illusions about how alarming the situation on trade policy currently is. A whole range of unilateral, illegal protectionist measures initiated by the Trump Administration are shaking to its foundations our open-trading system, which has brought such benefits over the past 70 years. This is the most immediate and most fundamental challenge to what we frequently refer to as the rules-based international system, which it is in our national interest to support and strengthen. The Trump/Xi meeting dealt with some trade issues, but let us not kid ourselves. It was not a ceasefire, as it has been described by rather gullible journalists. It merely avoided making a bad situation a lot worse. What action are the Government taking to reverse that trend towards protectionism? What will be done to ensure that the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement procedure does not collapse in a few months’ time as a result of the US refusal to appoint new adjudicators or panel members?

On climate change too, the result was certainly sub- optimal, but the commitment of 19 of the 20 participants to the Paris accords was, in my view, better than accepting the weasel words that the US would have preferred. The great challenge that lies ahead is in implementing and strengthening those Paris accords, inadequate as they certainly are, and that lies ahead, but I would like to know what strategy the Government have for doing better when the UN Secretary-General calls together a summit meeting on climate change this autumn.

I have two final points. Others have made the point that it is necessary to find some way of monitoring progress in fulfilling commitments in the periods between these annual meetings. I would like to hear what the Government think can be done about that. Suggestions have been made about the IMF or the OECD doing it; there are perfectly good ways in which participants could be brought up to the fact that they are not actually doing very much to fulfil the warm words they agreed at the last meeting. Secondly, I give three cheers for the successful conclusion of the EU-Mercosur agreement, which was announced during the summit, even though that achievement looks set to become yet another piece of Brexit-related collateral damage if the two aspirants to the Prime Minister’s post get their way and take us out of the European Union by 31 October.