THE Prime Minister yesterday admitted to a sense of frustration at the failure of the West to influence the outcome of the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.
An emphatic condemnation of the Indian nuclear arms testing emerged from the G8 summit but the Prime Minister more or less conceded they were impotent without the co-operation of India and Pakistan.
Speaking at the end of the three- day summit in Birmingham, Mr Blair said: ''I think there is a sense of frustration about what has happened but I think there is also a determination that we have a strategy to deal with this.''
Mr Blair extracted a commitment from the Indian prime minister to begin immediate discussions on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a position eventually endorsed by his G8 colleagues.
While the Americans, the Japanese and the Germans have already imposed sanctions Mr Blair skillfully negotiated their agreement to a communique which stopped short of sanctions but demanded that India and Pakistan adhered immediately to the non-proliferation agreements.
Mr Blair had never favoured sanctions on the grounds that they would hit the poorest without necessarily affecting the sub continent's nuclear arms race.
The G8 summit in Birmingham, at which for the first time Russia was included as a full formal member, concentrated this year on a very focused agenda and was widely accepted as an harmonious and successful summit.
The agenda was dominated by Northern Ireland and the immediate crisis in the Indian sub continent but the most remarkable feature of the last three days was the increasingly strong relationship between the Blair and Clinton camps, and the bond between the Blair and Clinton couples.
The body language was there for the world to see, and the political dividend is the mutual support extended to each other.
The Clintons spent last night at Chequers - the first American President to do so since Richard Nixon - where they were joined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and the Education Secretary David Blunkett.
The world leaders agreed a text on development and aid with a number of elements in it - not least of which was a commitment to continuing and substantial aid, resources for the World Bank and new efforts to get countries to untie aid.
While it fell short of the demands of the 40,000 human chain protesters who gathered in Birmingham on Saturday from all over the UK to support the cancellations of all the debts of the developing world, it was a positive commitment to relieve the international debt.
Britain led the way with resources to cut the death rate from the world's diseases with a #60m contribution to the World Health Organisation's roll-back malaria initiative.
There was unanimous agreement for new financial practices learned in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.
The propositions included transparency, codes of good practice with publicity for those who fall short.
The Prime Minister, who chaired each session during the summit, described the new financial architecture as ''a set of international economic and financial standards with countries which can subscribe to and which then help both give them credibility in international and economic terms and also ensure that the markets function in a more stable way''.
A number of actions to tackle international crime and the fight against drugs was adopted. Within the next two years they have agreed to establish a United Nations convention against transnational organised crime, and most significantly, they agreed to implement a 10-point action plan on hi-tech crime.
Money laundering, asset confiscation, corruption, trafficking of human beings, and illegal firearms and joint law enforcement were all agreed.
It was widely believed that without such a focused agenda, and the confinement of discussion to tight-knit groups the final outcome would have been much less effective. Such was its success the leaders agreed to stick with the new format when it meets next June in Cologne.
Need for an even keel Page 11
Leader comment Page 13
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