Press briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: A year after Glenagles, Charles Clarke, Pensions, EU Rebate-Budget and Somme
A year after Glenagles
The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) outlined the speech the Prime Minister would deliver this evening at King’s College London. The Prime Minister would set out the progress made since Gleneagles on Africa and Climate Change. He would announce that he was establishing the Africa Progress Panel, which was something that the Commission for Africa had called for. It would be a panel of world leaders from all sectors to ensure that the promises made at Gleneagles on Africa were kept. Kofi Annan had agreed to co-chair the panel. Bob Geldof and President Obasanjo were also on the panel as was Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International. Other panel members would be announced at a later date. The Gates Foundation had agreed to fund the panel and the secretariat.
The Prime Minister would also announce that DfID’s budget for education would double to over £1bn a year by 2010, which was up from the £450m last year. The Prime Minister would say that he was disappointed that Gleneagles had not been able to make more progress on trade. He had, however, worked hard since then to turn this political commitment into a real breakthrough. The Prime Minister would say that we were not there yet and that the coming month would be critical. He would go on to say that failure would not only be a blow for the poor but to the whole idea of multilateralism. The Prime Minister had spoken recently to President Bush, Chancellor Merkel, President Chirac, President Lula, President Mbeki and to Pascal Lamy, Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The Prime Minister believed that there was a still flexibility in people’s positions and he would shortly be writing to leaders setting out how he thought things could move forward.
On Climate Change, the Prime Minister would say that in the next twelve months we needed to build local consensus about the scale of the action we needed to take. We needed to begin agreement on a framework that the major players - US, China, India and Europe - bought into that had at its heart a goal to stabilise temperature and green house gas concentrations. We needed to accelerate discussions - we could not take the 5 years it had taken for Kyoto to be negotiated. A clear goal and a strong framework would help spur the technology revolution we needed. It was vital to give business the certainty it needed to invest in cleaner technology and reduce emissions.
Put that other than the Africa Progress Panel none of this was new, the PMOS said that the DfID education funding was new. The point about Gleneagles was that it had set a very ambitious agenda, certainly as far as Africa was concerned. The important thing now was that we followed through that ambitious agenda. That agenda did not stretch just into this year but into the years ahead. The whole purpose of the Africa Panel was to make sure world leaders lived up to the promises that they had made last year. This was not a year for new promises, it was a year for making sure that everyone delivered on the promises that were made last year at Gleneagles. We needed to make sure that everyone who signed up to the Gleneagles agreement lived up to his or her commitments.
Asked whether there was a fear of backsliding particularly as the Russians had not shown great enthusiasm for St Petersburg, the PMOS said the Russians would speak for themselves. It was important that we kept reminding people in government and the public who had supported the Make Poverty History campaign what it was that we had collectively agreed to do last year and that we lived up to that. Asked what the Prime Minister would be writing to leaders about on the trade talks, the PMOS suggested that it was best that the Prime Minister wrote first to the leaders before going into details. The Prime Minister wanted to emphasise to world leaders what was at stake and what he thought was a possible way forward. It was still lead by the WTO and within the EU by the commission, but we wanted to underline why we believed, and not just because of the Gleneagles, why this round was very important. Asked about the possible leaders summit President Lula had discussed, the PMOS said that everything was part of the same effort to get a deal. The Prime Minister had been keeping in regular contact with President Lula. He had met him at the EU/Latin America Summit in Vienna. The Prime Minister believed that the next month would be critical in the trade round talks.
Charles Clarke
Asked if the Prime Minister had any comment on Charles Clarke’s letter to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and comments from interviews this evening, the PMOS said that it was always better to wait for the actual interview before commenting. We had set out, at the time, the process and we had nothing further to add to what had been said then. Mr Clarke was perfectly entitled as an ex-Minister to set out his sequence of events but we had said all we wanted at this time.
Pensions
Asked if the government was going to freeze contributions to public sector pensions, the PMOS said that he had nothing to add to what the Cabinet Office had said over the weekend, which was that we would honour our agreement. Discussions on detail were continuing.
EU Rebate-Budget
Asked to comment on the suggestion of revisiting the EU budget deal, the PMOS said that there were always after EU budget deals technical discussions and this came under that heading.
Somme
Asked if the Prime Minister had any plans to go to the Somme 90th anniversary celebrations, PMOS said that he was not aware of any plans to do so.
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