John Redwood has been MP for Wokingham since 1987 and was invited by David Cameron to chair the Conservative Party's Economic Competitiveness Policy Group. He has held a number of ministerial and shadow cabinet roles and writes a regular blog.
The G20 agenda was always going to be a bizarre mixture of items reflecting the very different perceptions and priorities of twenty different world governments, and of the other countries and international institutions in attendance.
The leaders were unsure whether to spend more of their time on discussing how to get out of the present international economic downturn, or on trying to prevent something similar happening again. They were more willing to discuss greater regulation and higher borrowing in the future, than how much stimulus to apply to the present.
The US and the UK were keenest to get others to spend and borrow more. No country was prepared to use the summit as a platform to offer tax cuts or spending increases above those already announced.
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