G8 Summit

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, for this debate about the G8 in Northern Ireland. Of course, the G8 is more than about just trade. As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, reminded us, it is about people, culture and science. Ireland’s unparalleled contribution to culture, with its great scientists and poets, is familiar to us all. A connection between trade and culture comes to mind. When Oscar Wilde went to New York in the 1880s, he was asked as he went through customs whether he had anything to declare. He replied that he had only his genius to declare.

Of course, I approve of the enthusiasm expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, for trade and the contribution of the European Commission in those negotiations, which has a dominant role in determining non-tariff barriers, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. Without the role of the EC, we would not be in this position of influencing and participating in these extremely important global determinants of trade.

I will not repeat the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, about a more realistic approach in the international world of negotiation, which I was delighted to hear. I will say only that the extraordinary issue of how the international framework of discussions should be changed cannot be solved by a collection of Prime Ministers sitting around the table. Surely it should proceed by initiating research programmes of many think tanks and universities around the world. The first step would be to put it on the agenda. If we could all agree that there should be an international research programme on that, involving all the countries the noble Lord mentioned, that would be a way forward. We cannot just have a snap decision, obviously. So are the Government thinking about this?

Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, mentioned, we live in a highly networked world. At the meeting in Brussels on Tuesday on global systems, organised by the European Commission, a colleague working on energy from University College put up a slide of Buckminster Fuller’s 1939 vision of a global electrical power network. As he commented, in fact we are now having a transfer of electricity from the UK, Europe, Russia to China; before long it will be India. While we are having these extraordinary technical collaborations, which are growing consistently, our political masters are blowing hot and cold about how we should collaborate.

It was rather the same in the Cold War when, for instance, all weather forecasts were exchanged. The only person who did not play cricket about weather was Saddam Hussein, who turned off the weather when he arrived in Kuwait. This was considered a very bad show. It had never happened before. The point is that there is a technical world and a political world. Fortunately, the technical world carries on, but of course we need to connect the two.

The other important point about the 2006 UK G8 meeting, which the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, emphasised, was that despite the terrorist bombing in London—which I heard from my office in UCL; it was very frightening for many people in London—important commitments were made to reducing third-world debt, increasing aid and tackling climate change. One of the important events of that G8 meeting was that the UK Government, with backing from many other Governments, supported a parallel meeting of global legislators that began a sustained programme of introducing new laws and regulations in countries to deal with climate change. That is an absolutely necessary underpinning of international agreements.

That work was extremely controversial when it began. For example, only in 2006, many countries regarded deforestation as a neo-colonial word to stop people cutting down trees. It just shows how concepts have developed and collaboration has increased. Now this kind of approach is very much supported by the World Bank, the FCO, and UN climate agencies. In fact, progressively the G8 has undertaken many of its projects in conjunction with other bodies. It is no longer regarded as just an exclusive body. In Italy in 2007, for example, I attended a remarkable meeting of G8 and UNESCO. It was a meeting on innovation and education which involved innovation from countries all over the world, such as pioneering development of inexpensive medicine in India. This progressive outreach of G8 is something we should continue. Again, this is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell said, the notion that G8 is just an in-group of a few leaders is not how it is working out.

I also want to make the sideways comment that Canadian legislators have taken a very strong lead in this idea of legislators working together on climate. I am afraid they have to regret the policies of their Government rather forcefully.

In 2012, the G8 under the United States chairmanship focused on the Arab spring and the contribution of science and technology with natural disasters. Its focus on the former has not been very successful, one might say, but its work on the latter was a continuation and a building on the work of the United Nations report in 2012 bringing together UN agencies and other parts of the United Nations systems in explaining the impacts connecting natural disasters and climate change as well world population. Again, the G8 helped to underpin a very broad United Nations-wide initiative.

This year, as we learn from the House of Lords Library paper, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bates, has also referred, the Government have organised some specialised conferences to deal with specialised issues. Some of them have only involved G8 countries—for example the G8 science meeting—but others have had a broad membership of civil society groups in the G8 and other countries. I hope that theme will continue. There were two separate meetings on nutrition and innovation. However, these two themes need to be connected. For example, there are remarkable improvements in India with people now using social media to learn about the best use of agricultural aids as well as acquire data about weather and climate. This is having remarkable effects. To start with, there was some resistance to the use of social media. The idea of giving people mobile phones in place of seed was, as it were, an issue to be discussed. Now we realise that these two things have to go together.

Despite the remark of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, about too much data, there is not enough data in African countries. African farmers are not collecting and measuring their rain. You must collect your rain if you want to know how your crops will develop during the season—knowing whether you have less or more rain. Many other areas of data are collected by many different agencies in African countries which are simply not exchanged. Some noble Lords will have heard me banging on about this before, but I still find it hard to get that sharp focus on the simple question of data exchange being accepted as an important issue by aid agencies and even DfID. They are very keen on global computer models, and so am I, but I am also keen on people measuring rain.

Finally, this G8 meeting, like others, raises issues and starts initiatives. I hope that the UK will set an example which other countries have not followed very much: reporting on the G8 meeting during the following year, so that we know what has happened. For example, we have our Library document, which covers initiatives this year, but it is difficult to find out how it connects to initiatives in previous years. That would be very helpful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Will this report be in the Library?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not know whether it is yet in the Library. It was published two days ago. I will do my best, looking hopefully at the Box, to put it in the Library as soon as we can. I must say that I have been briefed by a number of officials who are working incredibly hard for the G8 exercise. I am very grateful that one of them has been able to spare a bit of time out of her 14-hour day to come here and assist me in this and I wish to add my compliment on her remarkably clear handwriting.

The G8 is an informal directing group and the discussions within the G8 then feed out to others. On the final lunch the secretaries-general of the IMF and the OECD will be there and the tax transparency agenda will be carried on quite largely through the OECD. The land ownership agenda, which was mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, will be carried out partly through the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Discussions are part of a very intricate network in which we work as we can with others. There are a number of associated conferences now. We have had a Foreign Ministers’ G8 with very active engagement from the Russians on issues such as Syria and elsewhere. We do not always agree but we are actively discussing these issues. There is also the Science and Innovation conference mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. The Nutrition for Growth compact has been signed by 24 Governments from the developed and developing worlds, 22 business groups, four science organisations and a number of major international non-governmental organisations.

Sessions at the G8 will cover the global economy, including trade, and the very important bilateral negotiations which have been taking place between the EU and Japan and which will be taking place between the EU and the United States. There will be a session on international political issues and foreign policy, a session on countering international and cross-border terrorism, a session particularly devoted to tax and transparency, and a final lunch at which the delegates will be joined not only by the secretaries-general I have mentioned but also by a number of other senior figures from Africa and South America.

The Prime Minister has focused on the three Ts—trade, tax and transparency. I have already spoken about trade. We very much hope that we will be able to get back to a global trade agenda with the World Trade Organisation. However, some of the leading members of G20 have not been particularly co-operative on a global trade agenda which is why we are having to pursue regional trade negotiations. If we are able to achieve a trade agreement between the United States and the European Union to follow those with Japan, Korea and Canada, we will have made a major contribution to global economic growth. This is about the rules which shape global trade and the fairness and openness which characterise them.

We have also discussed tax. Britain has a particular responsibility here because of the number of overseas territories and Crown dependencies which have become offshore financial centres. The Prime Minister has been in contact with all of our overseas territories and Crown dependencies. They have now all agreed on a number of measures. Bermuda is still discussing the question of a multilateral convention on mutual assistance on tax matters but we hope to resolve that issue with Bermuda before we have sorted out the complete agenda for the G8.

I was asked about the fourth money-laundering directive. This is an EU measure and proposals are currently being negotiated by member states and the European Parliament. They would require that companies obtain information on their beneficial ownership, hold this information and make the information available to competent authorities. The European agenda, the global agenda and the G8 agenda overlap and complement each other. In all of this one has to recognise that tax sovereignty and global markets do not go easily together. That is why we have to pursue these international negotiations on tax transparency in order to regain a degree of our tax sovereignty. The Government have been relatively successful over the past three years at regaining tax from multinational companies. I am told that HMRC has collected more than £23 billion in extra tax since 2010 through challenging large businesses’ tax arrangements and tackling transfer pricing issues, and we continue to hope that we will raise a good deal more through tax transparency.

As noble Lords know, transparency is about not only tax but beneficial ownership. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked particularly about transparency over land tenure. The problem with land tenure in developing countries is that often records do not exist, so in terms of technical assistance, as part of bilateral or multilateral aid programmes, helping these countries to establish clear records of land tenure is a necessary part of what we do to establish who owns what, where foreign companies are buying in and how far we protect local farmers on their own. There is very careful work on greater transparency with less developed countries, starting with proper land records.

On 22 May the Prime Minister announced that Her Majesty’s Government intend to sign up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which was set up to tackle corruption, to improve the way in which the revenues from oil, gas and minerals are managed and to ensure that people across the world share in the economic benefits of natural resources in their country. A lack of transparency there, as with land transactions, is very much part of the obstacles that we have to overcome in ensuring that free trade and open markets benefit everyone, including the poor and weak countries, which are often open to these sorts of extractive industries in particular.

The lunch on Tuesday will focus particularly on Africa, looking at the millennium development goals and, as we have already mentioned, talking about the larger issue of nutrition. I am disappointed that we are not paying more attention to population on this occasion. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, is disappointed that we are not spending more time on climate change, although there will be preparations for a major conference in 2015 under different tutelage—the UN Committee on Climate Change—which will be a main focus.

With regard to our political discussions, I was asked particularly about Syria. At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, the Prime Minister said:

“We should use the G8 to try to bring pressure on all sides to bring about what we all want … which is a peace conference, a peace process, and the move towards a transitional Government in Syria”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/6/13; col. 331.]

This has been a worthwhile debate. I was nervous that the agenda of the G8 was so wide that I would be unable to cope with many of the questions that would come in. I sat here trying to imagine the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talking to his Soviet colleagues during the Cold War about eastern and western approaches to weather forecasting and whether there was a Marxist approach to it as well as a capitalist one.

We have looked back to the previous UK-sponsored G8 in 2005. Gleneagles was a great success and helped to push the G8 on to the development agenda to a much greater extent than before. It is still managing to push that forward. This Government, as the Nutrition for Growth compact shows, are still attempting to use the combined efforts of the developed democracies, non-governmental organisations and international organisations as such to promote a more open global market and a more equitable global society.

We look forward to a successful G8 summit next week. This is of course only one in a long series of heavy intergovernmental negotiations, but Her Majesty’s Government are using this opportunity to press forward what I hope all noble Lords will agree is a very worthwhile and constructive global agenda.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Will the Minister respond on the issue of water? This is the United Nations International Year of Water Co-operation and the water issue has not really had the emphasis it should have had, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McColl.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has sponsored one or two conferences on water in the Middle East in the past year with the support of the Foreign Office. We are all well aware of the many complexities of water. Those of us following the argument between Ethiopia and Egypt over the dam on the Blue Nile will know that water wars are not necessarily too far away. There are a great many complications and the Government understand that not only clean water but also cross-border water supplies are very important matters for us to deal with. It is not neglected simply because it is not a major item on this year’s G8 agenda.