This week Sir Keir Starmer jetted off to the Cop29 conference in Baku in Azerbaijan to make a speech for home consumption.
He announced he was accepting the recommendations of the UK’s Climate Change Committee and committed to cut emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035.
British TV and newspapers presented this announcement as if it made a major contribution to the climate conference, whereas it was something of purely national importance.
Cop29 is a UN conference where the real matter at hand is not to set targets (which are never met), but how to finance poor countries who are most exposed to climate change.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said small, climate-vulnerable island states have the right to be angry with rich nations for their failure to lead on climate action.
“You are on the sharp end of a colossal injustice, an injustice that sees the very future of your islands threatened by rising seas. Negotiators must finalise the creation of a loss and damage fund and boost funding for adaptation and mitigation,” Guterres said.
Starmer was seen in conversation with Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, who has been leading the charge to transform the way global financial institutions help developing countries — and particularly vulnerable nations like hers — access the money needed to combat climate change.
However, he had nothing to say about that. His contribution was for British media.
In that respect Starmer was not alone; it’s the way things are. It isn’t only climate change and Cop29. That’s only a useful illustration.
There’s much talk about misinformation and disinformation, but it probably doesn’t occur to most people that the information they receive, even the accurate and balanced stuff, is passed through a national filter.
When Micheál Martin goes to speak at the UN general assembly, RTÉ covers his speech even though it’s to a hall three-quarters empty and no-one gives tuppence about anything he says.
When someone is attacked by a shark off Bondi Beach, it’s covered in the British media and here because there are millions of people in Australia connected to Britain and Ireland, many with relatives living there. That news won’t be covered anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand you won’t have heard much about Opération Barkhane in Saharan countries, which the French conducted from 2014-22 against Islamists and Russian mercenaries.
After they pulled out of Niger last year following a coup, the French government has now decided to review their presence in the Sahel so there’ll be Foreign Legion and Special Forces only in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Senegal and Chad. More significant than a shark attack?
Sadly, after Brexit, what’s happening in European countries is no longer of any interest in Britain.
Thus a sharp dispute between Spain and Mexico in October made no headlines.
Spain’s King Felipe VI wasn’t invited to the inauguration of Mexico’s new President, Claudia Sheinbaum, because Felipe’s predecessor wouldn’t apologise for abuses Spain committed during Mexico’s colonial period.
The Irish media covered the story – Spain’s a close political ally in the EU – but it seems no-one in Britain was interested.
What’s more important than that spat is Britain ignoring the current process in the EU parliament ratifying 27 new EU commissioners.
For the next five years these people are in charge of everything the EU does like security, competition, fisheries, energy, health, animal welfare, tourism, you name it. Ireland’s commissioner, Michael McGrath, is responsible for democracy, justice and the rule of law in the EU.
You’d think the British government might be interested in who these people are and what their views are, especially since Starmer’s government claims it wants to have a close and developing relationship with the EU.
Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find any coverage of the process or personalities in the British media.
The depressing fact is that since Brexit with its anti-EU tirades, the British political and media scenes, which are inextricably linked, have become smaller in scope, more nationalistic and more introspective.
There is more attention paid to former colonies than to nearby neighbours with whom Britain trades and which British people visit far more than anywhere else.
Compare RTÉ, which has a daily feature entitled ‘A European Perspective’ covering events across the EU. Britain prefers to concentrate on the USA (‘special relationship’ you know), not seeming to realise there’s no reciprocation.
Anyone believing they are receiving a full picture of what’s important world news from BBC, ITV, Sky and the British press is seriously deluded.
