G8/G20 Meetings.

Over the weekend G8 and G20 groups of nations have held their annual meeting in Toronto Canada. It might be partly my fault that this event was slightly over hyped because the G8/G20 meetings were actually less important then the World Cup.

G8 and G20 meetings are normally very informal. There's not really any set agenda and no real objectives for the meeting as a whole to reach. Instead they're more about getting the leaders of the 20 most power countries together so they can meet each other and get to know each other while gossiping about some of the major international issues of the day. This year those issues included efforts to re-build Haiti after January's earthquake, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the usual discussion about international economic development and the by now routine call for the completion of the Doha round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks which have been dragging on for nine years now.

The main topic though was the global economy and how to proceed with the economic recovery plan that was enacted after the London emergency summit and the G20's 2010 Summit proper that was held in Pittsburgh. Here there was a little bit of tension between nations like Britain, France and Germany who want to bring an early end to stimulus spending and speed up efforts to reduce their national deficits. On the other side of the argument there were countries like the USA and China who wanted to continue stimulus spending and reduce deficits more slowly over a longer period of time.

Obviously as the economic situation in the USA is different from the economic situation in Germany which is in turn different from the economic situation in Greece the G20 agreed that countries that countries who want to cut quickly should cut quickly and those countries who wish to cut slowly should cut slowly. There also seemed to be a slight cooling amongst the G20 nations towards plans to re-design the global financial system. I think this is a good idea because the plan was really forced through by Gordon Brown at the height of the global economic crisis. Britain has already got rid of Gordon Brown so I don't really see why the G20 should keep his ideas going.

The resolution to the economic discussion appears to be what Britain was expecting. After all they are actually cutting more slowly then they would like everyone to believe. There was the big emergency budget of last week which was basically a PR stunt to reassure the markets. Britain won't really be announcing what and where they'll be cutting until the spending review in October 2010. The announced cuts won't actually begin to take effect until the early part of 2011 so that gives the Brits time to wait and see what everyone else is doing so they can refine their plan to make maximum advantage. They were hoping that the G20 meeting could be used to get the other nations to give Britain even more clues about what they intend to do. To this end there were some pretty big and violent protests that all seemed stage managed by the Canadian hosts whose police waited until the second day of the summit to search and seal the sewage tunnels that ran under the venue.

Judging by what's been going on today the Brits didn't get what they wanted so they've opened a salvo of stories to draw attention to themselves. Firstly there is the story of criticism of the polices botched investigation into serial rapist, Kirk Reid. So in a week I've gone from a paedophile to a serial rapist - that's an improvement of sorts. Secondly there's all the discussion of when and if Fabio Capello, the manager of the England football team will lose his job. It's not worth getting into the code but I can't see what the problem with Capello is, he did exactly what the Brits hired him for. He fielded a lack lustre team that forced the USA to win the "group of torture" and set up a tense England V Germany game on the final day of the G20 Summit. You can't really blame him for the referees mistake in that game and if I'm being honest I think the Brits would prefer it if the UK population focused on things like the Wimbledon tennis tournament rather then getting caught up with "all this foreign nonsense."