Among the many crucial decisions Andy Burnham has to make over the next few weeks, one has gone almost completely unremarked: what Britain’s priorities will be when it assumes the presidency of the G20 next year. Burnham has said he wants to concentrate on domestic policy. But with the world in turmoil, chairing the group of the world’s largest economies will be one of his most important responsibilities.
The last time the UK chaired the forum was in 2009, when Gordon Brown presided over the rescue of the global economy after the financial crash. Before the London summit in April 2009, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had wrung his hands, saying that “none of us has a plan”. Barack Obama had a quick response to this: “Gordon has a plan.” He did.
Brown got the G20 to agree to a $5tn fiscal stimulus among its member states, increase International Monetary Fund lending to developing countries and create a new global coordinator for financial regulation, the Financial Stability Board. But 2009 was a rare year for the G20, in that it actually achieved something. In general, the long communiques issued at its annual leaders’ summits reflect only the lowest-common-denominator agreement on broad principles.
The G20 rarely commits its members to doing anything they were not planning to do anyway, and only occasionally makes genuinely collective decisions. One of the most consequential was the suspension of developing countries’ debt during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the subsequent establishment of a “common framework” for debt treatment. Indeed, for what is meant to be the effective executive committee of the global economy, the G20 is an oddly weak institution.
Its 19 members (plus the EU and the African Union) have no HQ or staff and do not even have a standing website: if you want to know what the G20 has agreed over the past 20 years you need to go to a set of unofficial webpages hosted by some enterprising academics at the University of Toronto. For most countries, hosting the G20 summit is a chance to impress its domestic audience by showing that its head of government bestrides the world stage. Last year Donald Trump boycotted it; the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was glad simply to get any kind of agreed communique.
This year, the US is the host, with one of Trump’s own properties near Miami the summit venue in December: expect a show of personal and US power and very little attempt to achieve anything by way of multilateral cooperation. But that makes Burnham’s task next year even more critical. The UK needs to show that it is still possible for the world’s leading nations – including the US and China – to work together to meet the key challenges facing the world.
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