Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
There is a sense of foreboding and expectation about the pace at which the G7 is addressing the issue of the distribution of vaccines to Africa, with many concerned that the G7 leaders are not going to get the urgency of this right.
Here is one example that captures the flavour from the film-maker Richard Curtis, a UN advocate for the sustainable development goals. He told the Guardian:
This weekend world leaders have the opportunity to show they are serious about achieving the UN global goals for sustainable development – a historic plan they all signed up to in 2015. That plan included a commitment to deliver good health and wellbeing for everyone – which Covid has made the central challenge facing the world. We need to see a real historic deal on vaccines at this summit. It’s a unique moment for brave global leadership, it isn’t about nice half measures, it’s about making sure one billion doses are delivered worldwide by September, sharing knowledge and getting a global financing deal to help vaccinate the world.
This G7 summit is an opportunity to help make Covid history. Seven people in a room doing the extraordinary thing, by being brave, of saving countless lives and all our economies. I hope and pray that Prime Minister Johnson will lead the way.
Kirsty McNeill, policy director at Save the Children is also worried that a gap is appearing this year in supply that the offers by G7 nations is not meeting. She said:
It is ultimately the agreement or not of a global financing plan to vaccinate the world on which this summit – held as the pandemic still rages – will be judged. The education and dose sharing announcements provide some foundations, but the jury is still out on whether the prime minister will lead the G7 or merely host them.
David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, speaking at a Brookings Institution event, was equally stark, saying:
We are winning the race between vaccines and variants in the rich world and losing the race in the poor world. There is a danger that victory is declared in the rich world before the battle has even been engaged in the poor world. We are taking a massive risk.
He added: “We need to focus on not just redistribution, but also distribution of vaccines.” He also said it was “important to see this not just as an issue of overseas aid since that misses the scale of this”.
Boris Johnson crammed quite a lot into the statement he delivered as he opened the first formal meeting of the G7. It was creative and audacious, potentially inspiring, but not always tactful, and perhaps not plausible. Here are the four key points he made, with analysis of their credibility.
- Johnson said the G7 should stop inequalities becoming “entrenched” after the Covid pandemic. He said:
What’s gone wrong with this pandemic, or what risks being a lasting scar, is that inequalities may be entrenched. And we need to make sure that, as we recover, we level up across our societies and we rebuild back better.
This is wholly laudable. And it reflects one of the concerns raised by the G7 gender equality advisory council, which is making a presentation to the summit this afternoon (see 11.17am), although there is also copious evidence, in Britain and worldwide, that the pandemic will exacerbate inequalities.
But in speaking about wanting to “level up” and “build back better”, Johnson was deploying Tory slogans, and for a moment it sounded as if he were trying to co-opt the G7 into a party campaign video.
More seriously, his comment invites scrutiny about how serious Johnson really is about tackling inequality. He is committed to levelling up in the UK, but he has avoiding setting any precise benchmarks for how this should be measured, and he does not seem to see it as a commitment to reducing inequalities of income or wealth. He sees it in terms of infrastructure spending, and extending opportunity.
Less than two weeks ago Johnson’s educational recovery commissioner resigned because he thought Johnson was not doing anything like enough to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, a problem set to increase educational inequalities.
In the past Johnson actually defended inequality. In 2013 he gave a speech saying “some measure of inequality”, like greed, was, “a valuable spur to economic activity”.
- Johnson suggested that the austerity introduced after the 2008 financial crash was a mistake, or at least went too far. He said:
It is vital that we don’t repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession in 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society.
Johnson has said before that he does not like the term austerity, and as prime minister he has shown a desire to increase public spending that shows he is no George Osborne. But it is still a little surprising to see him use an international forum to effectively dismiss the central economic policy of his predecessor-but-one as prime minister and Conservative leader.
This was also another example of Johnson saying “we” when it sounded as if he was actually talking about Britain. Not all G7 countries responded to the financial crash with austerity on an Osborne scale.
- Johnson claimed that spending on green energy initiatives would reduce inequality. He said:
And I actually think that we have a huge opportunity to [build back better] because, as G7, we are united in our vision for a cleaner, greener world, a solution to the problems of climate change. And in those ideas, in those technologies, which we’re all addressing together, I think there is the potential to generate many, many millions of high-wage, high-skill jobs.
This was a clever attempt to link two policy goals to which he is personally committed: levelling up, and addressing the climate crisis. But is this any more than just wishful thinking? Investment might generate a more equal society, but it might not; other policy levers are as or more important.
- Johnson suggested all governments had made mistakes in their handling of Covid. He said:
Given the pandemic we need to make sure that we don’t repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so.
Johnson has already admitted his government made many errors handing Covid. But this comment appears to minimise his responsibility, by implying that all governments were much the same. In fact, Britain had the highest levels of excess deaths in Europe by last summer, although since then other countries have overtaken it. Johnson also seemed to be overlooking the fact that Joe Biden only took office in January, and Mario Draghi only took office in February.
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