Summit about nothing

As a rule of thumb, it is wise to ignore anything said at any summit beginning with the letter G. When Harold Wilson went to the G6 summit in 1975 there was a point: there had just been an oil crisis so Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States got together to discuss it. The meetings continued without an agenda. The admission of Russia, with its appalling record on civil economic liberty, turned the G8 summits into a biannual joke. So when the G20 meets in Pittsburgh next week, the world knows precisely what to expect.

The last summit, in London, ended with Gordon Brown triumphantly claiming to have brokered a $1 trillion deal to kick-start the world economy. The figure was entirely concocted by the Prime Minister, without so much as a penny of new money. But nothing substantial, of course, can ever emerge from any such summit. The G20 leaders, with a few dictatorial exceptions, do not have the authority to agree to anything without the agreement of their legislatures. All they are capable of is producing deliberately woolly communiqués.

Yet the summit, with its comic photocalls and its behind-the-scenes power-broking, does serve as a useful guide to how geopolitical power is shifting. China, for example, is now treated as the most honoured guest, seeing as it has the money which chronically indebted countries like Britain and America are dependent on. The South Koreans, too, are slowly being regarded as paymasters rather than guests. As the extraordinary recovery in Asian markets demonstrates, their clout is only likely to increase.

Australia and Canada are also standing strikingly tall. Neither country is nursing a budget crisis, with the kind of eye-popping deficits suffered here. Neither have had to stump up a cent of taxpayer’s money to support a failed bank.