G8: breakthrough or fake-through?

Last Modified: 09 Jul 2008
By: Channel 4 News

Inside the morning meeting.

The G8 summit wraps up today, with Gordon Brown doing a press conference as we meet, but already the industrialised leaders' key achievements are starting to unravel.

Yesterday was hailed as a proud breakthrough on climate change, with a target set to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2050.

'What can the G8 do? To have any meaningful discussion on inflation, you need China and India; you can't have a discussion on oil prices without Saudi Arabia.'

But developing countries - China and India among them - have said overnight that the developed world must take tougher action itself before setting goals for less industrialised countries.

"There's also a cloud over Brown's other great achievement - tough Zimbabwe sanctions - with Russia baling out."

Wasn't the whole thing a fake-through rather than a breakthrough? wonders an editor.

Leaders can go back to their publics, and say they tried their best, made an agreement, but someone else scuppered it?

"Doesn't it show that the G8 is utterly pointless?" asks a reporter. "What can they do - to have any meaningful discussion on inflation, you need to have China and India; you can't have a discussion on oil prices without Saudi Arabia..."

Quite how meaningful the 50 per cent emissions-cutting target is anyway is questionable, a science correspondent points out. It's not that different from previous G8 targets, and the deadline year is a very long way off.

Our diplomatic editor Jonathan Rugman is due to fly back from Japan with the prime minister this morning, meaning we are limited as to how much he can report back to us for tonight's show, but the key summit issues whether from abroad or from London.

Plenty to discuss also on rape, or rather, the crime's low - 6 per cent - conviction rate. Earlier this week, the Fawcett Society said conviction rates were a postcode lottery, and a top policeman has now called for specialist rape squads in every police force.

"Don't they all have specialist units already?"

"No - some do but not all of them."

"They may have a specialist officer or a rape suite, but not necessarily a specialist squad."

"What should the target for rape conviction be? Can it be that for something like burglary, you can have a 100 per cent conviction rate, but for rape that's not necessarily possible?"

On a lighter note, our arts correspondent Nicholas Glass is talking to architect Frank Gehry, who is designing this year's Serpentine Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park.

In the run-up to Beijing, international editor Lindsay Hilsum offers a piece on how China deals with dissent. Today is the launch of Beijing's official Olympic month, but do we really want two pre-Olympics pieces, two days in a row? This and a host of other stories jostle for space at 7pm tonight.