G7: Boris Johnson calls for lessons of pandemic to be learned and says world must ‘level up’ – as it happened

• 5.47pm BST17:47 Afternoon summary
• 4.14pm BST16:14 Aid experts express concern G7 vaccine measures will not meet challenge of what's needed
• 4.01pm BST16:01 How credible is Johnson's anti-inequality plea for G7?
• 3.09pm BST15:09 Johnson says G7 must stop inequalities being 'entrenched' after Covid
• 2.54pm BST14:54 Boris Johnson chairs G7 summit's opening meeting, saying world should 'level up' after pandemic
• 10.38am BST10:38 Seven people arrested near G7 after cars found with smoke grenades
• 10.06am BST10:06 Who's attending the G7 summit?

• Boris Johnson was accused of hypocrisy after announcing at the G7 leaders’ summit he would provide £430m of extra UK funding for girls’ education in 90 developing countries – only weeks after his government made “inexcusable cuts” of more than £200m to funding set aside for the same cause this year.

• Johnson has told G7 leaders at the start of their summit they should stop inequalities becoming “entrenched” after the Covid pandemic. (See 3.09pm and 4.01pm.)

• Johnson has rejected claims that his plan for the UK to donate 100m doses of vaccine to poorer countries over the next year does not go far enough. (See 9.18am) He has said that he wants a total of one billion doses of vaccine to be pledged to developing countries at the G7 summit. Given that the US has already promised a 500m-dose donation, he is 60% of the way there already. (See 9.40am.) But aid campaigners say Johnson’s target is not ambitious enough. (See 4.14pm.)

From AFP’s Deborah Cole

From the French embassy in the UK’s Twitter account

From Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove

Jennifer Jacobs from Bloomberg has a picture of the bicycle that Joe Biden gave Boris Johnson yesterday in the usual exchange of gifts on a transatlantic visit.

As the Times’ Patrick Maguire points out, Johnson’s gift to Biden was not in the same league.

Global Citizen, a global anti-poverty campaigning group, has also criticised the UK’s vaccine offer (see 9.18am) as not going far enough. Marie Rumsby, its UK country director, said:

We are disappointed by today’s announcement with the UK only planning to share five million doses by September, when the world urgently needs 1 billion doses by this date. As the G7 host, and a country whose vaccination rate is one of the highest in the world, PM Boris Johnson needs to donate more vaccine doses now, not next year, to ensure equitable vaccine access globally.

Downing Street has refused to rule out the prospect of the UK taking unilateral action to ensure British sausages can continue to go to Northern Ireland, PA Media reports. Asked if the government would be willing to extend the opt-out for chilled meats from Northern Ireland protocol rules, which is due to end from July, the PM’s spokesman told journalists: “We keep all options on the table”. As PA reports, the stance risks inflaming tensions with the European Union ahead of Boris Johnson’s meetings with the bloc’s leaders on Saturday.

Tom Newton Dunn from Times Radio has the timetable for those meetings.

Sarah Brown, wife of the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and chair of Theirworld, the global children’s charity she founded, has said the aid spending announced by the UK government this afternoon for education (see 4.37pm) does not go far enough. In a statement she said:

The commitment to global education from the UK government is a welcome first step in the right direction - but doesn’t go far enough, especially as it comes against a backdrop of savage cuts to the international aid budget which will push the world’s poorest people further to the margins.

The funding is a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the global education crisis - with these three pledges representing just 0.33% of the $75bn per year needed from donors to close the global education funding gap.

The UK government must use today as a starting point - not the end point - for bold action to get every child in the world into school and give them the future they deserve. This must include the UK reversing its decision to cut its international aid budget.

Unless this happens, hundreds of millions of children around the world will have their futures put at risk and the efforts to recover after this pandemic will be seriously undermined.

Downing Street has announced that the UK will be spending £430m on education in developing countries, with the funding going to the Global Partnership for Education. In a news release, Boris Johnson said:

The best way we can lift countries out of poverty and lead a global recovery is by investing in education and particularly girls’ education.

It is a source of international shame that every day around the world children bursting with potential are denied the chance to become titans of industry, scientific pioneers or leaders in any field, purely because they are female, their parents’ income or the place they were born.

I am calling on other world leaders, including those here at the G7, to also donate and put us firmly on a path to get more girls into the classroom, address the terrible setback to global education caused by coronavirus and help the world build back better.

Patrick Wintour

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.

Here is the opening statement that Boris Johnson delivered as the first session of the G7 summit got under way.

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. And we need to make sure that we now allow our economies to recover.

And I think that they have the potential to bounce back very strongly. And there’s all sorts of reasons for being optimistic, but 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.

And I think 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.

And I actually think that we have a huge opportunity to do that 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.

And I think that is what the people of our countries now want us to focus on. They wanted to be sure that we’re beating the pandemic together, discussing how we’ll never have a repeat of what we’ve seen, but also that we’re building better together, and building back greener and building back fairer, and building back more equal, in a more gender-neutral and perhaps a more feminine way - how about that?

So those are some of the objectives that we have before us at Carbis Bay.

Often these statements are platitudinous, but this one is quite intriguing. I’ll post an analysis shortly.