This morning I joined activists from the World Development Movement who were protesting outside the Department for International Development against plans to channel climate change aid to Bangladesh through the World Bank.

I welcome the UK government’s offer of bilateral aid to Bangladesh for climate change adaptation, but like the Bangladesh government I fail to see the need for a multilateral organisation like the World Bank to control the Multi Donor Trust Fund for Climate Change (MDTF) that the UK proposes should administer the aid.

The strings the World Bank may attach to the aid are clearly a concern for the Bangladesh government – and rightly so, given the Bank’s record of insisting on the adoption of neo-liberal policies as a condition for economic assistance to developing countries. And the exhorbitant fees charged by the World Bank for administering the fund would divert money away from the basic task of dealing with the consequences of global warming.

Bangladesh already has Trust Fund of its own and is in the process of setting up a management team for it. The Bangladesh government proposes that the MDTF should be managed by the same unit. While there is no objection to the World Bank acting as a technical consultant on behalf of the donors, the administration of the aid should be in the hands of a national unit.

It is important that these concerns are addressed at the donor conference currently under way in Dhaka and that we show full confidence the civilian government elected in Bangladesh. So it is a big yes to bilateral aid but a no to control by the World Bank.

Hopefully other sections of the media will take up this issue, because it is an important one for Londoners and for the capital’s business community in particular. As the Economist recently reported, the developing countries have grown in global importance economically due to their having escaped the worst consequences of the recession. So it’s vital that the Mayor should play an active role in promoting London in India.

I’d heard rumours that the GLA’s India offices were no longer functioning, so I tabled questions to Boris about it at Mayor’s Question Time last month. In a written reply he admitted that the offices in Delhi and Mumbai have not been staffed since last year, although he hadn’t bothered to inform Londoners that this was the case, and we would still be none the wiser if he hadn’t been challenged over it at MQT.

Boris’s vacillations and u-turns over the issue of the GLA’s international offices have been a sight to see. During his mayoral election campaign he initially condemned the offices as a waste of public money and said he would shut them down. In a December 2007 radio interview with Nick Ferarri, he was asked: “Would you continue bureaux in Venezuela, Delhi, Beijing and everywhere else? Yes or no.” Boris answered emphatically: “No.”

This went down well with anti-Livingstone journalists like Andrew Gilligan and Nick Cohen, and with parochially-minded Tory councillors lacking any concern for London’s strategic interests, but the business community recognised how damaging the closure of the international offices would be to the capital.

At a business hustings in March 2008, organised by London First, Ken Livingstone went onto the offensive over this issue. He told the meeting:

“The greatest challenge facing London businesses is globalisation, and therefore maintaining London as the most international and diverse business city in the world. To meet this challenge London has to build its position not only in traditional markets, such as the US, but in the huge new markets of India and China.

“Nothing therefore more clearly symbolises the difference between myself and Boris Johnson for London businesses, and the future of our city, than my opening offices to promote London in the US, China and India and Boris Johnson’s pledge to close down all offices promoting London abroad.”

The following month the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry announced that they had commissioned a ComRes survey of 238 London businesses which found that 67 per cent of companies said that the GLA should have offices in India and China to promote trade and inward investment into London.

Peter Bishop, LCCI international trade director, was quoted as saying: “These figures demonstrate that London firms are convinced of the value of operating these overseas ‘business embassies’. Strong business relations with the emerging economies of India and China are vital for the capital’s economic growth, creating jobs and attracting investment and tourism.

“In 2006 India was the second largest investor in London and Indian tourists outnumbered those from Japan. The London Chamber of Commerce hopes that all the candidates for next month’s mayoral election will take note of these results and pledge to keep these offices open.”

Faced with this opposition, Boris backed off and changed his line. In an interview with the Ethnic Minority Business Group (UK), he stated: “Whilst we fully endorse the representation of London overseas, we are also committed to reviewing the GLA’s offices abroad to ensure that London is getting maximum value from the money being spent on them. This review will be conducted as part of our larger investigation of the GLA and its agencies’ financial expenditures.”

Boris’s promised review was launched in May 2008, shortly after his election victory, and was headed by his then deputy Ian Clement.

At the time, Boris told the Standard: “We have started the process of considering which of the Greater London Authority’s international offices perform a useful strategic function and deliver value for money…. We will consider the role of the Indian and Chinese offices in encouraging inward investment and business opportunities for London. We are eager to get on and review the international offices’ role in increasing foreign investment and employment, delivering value for money and ensuring London takes full advantage of emerging international markets.”

London’s business community lobbied heavily for the offices to be retained. In a submission to Boris’s review the LCCI stated:

“Closing the offices in India and China as part of a cost-cutting exercise would be short-sighted and send entirely the wrong signals to potential investors and importers in two of London’s most important potential markets. The GLA may save £1 million, but it is London firms that may ultimately end up paying a much higher price. If the Mayor is not out there promoting London, someone else will be promoting New York, Paris, or Sydney instead.”

The review was supposed to be completed by autumn 2008. However, as is often the way with Boris, he missed the deadline and the results were not announced till the following January, when a press release from the Mayor reported that “the review found the rationale for London to have offices in key emerging markets is fundamentally sound”.

Boris’s press release quoted Ian Clement as saying: “It is absolutely essential given the current financial crisis that we do everything within our power to promote the capital in major markets around the world to ensure London emerges strongly from the downturn.

“We have taken a serious look at whether taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely and how to get the best possible deal for Londoners. The review has found that the GLA’s offices do play an important role in promoting London’s interests, from supporting the capital’s businesses to enhancing the image of our city around the world.”

Under the headline “Boris saves City Hall ‘embassies’”, the Evening Standard hailed the decision to retain the GLA’s overseas offices, reporting that the Mayor had decided to retain the offices “because they are a good way of promoting London abroad during the economic downturn”.

But it turns out that this was just eyewash. In response to my questions, Boris now concedes that the GLA’s representatives in Mumbai and Delhi “resigned last year and have not yet been replaced”, and that the offices will remain closed pending a decision on whether to reopen them. So much for Boris’s supposed commitment to promoting London abroad during the economic downturn.

Both Boris himself, and a spokesperson for the Mayor quoted in the Evening Standard report, have claimed that a review of the India offices is under way. They omit to mention that a review has already been held and that it came out unequivocally in favour of keeping the offices open. Boris has ignored the results of that review, mothballed the India offices and has now apparently launched a second review which he perhaps hopes will come up with a result more to his liking.

Some people take the view that Boris is a total opportunist who lacks any ideology other than a commitment to furthering his own political career. There is some truth to this. But Boris is not entirely without political principles. He remains an adherent of a Thatcherite free-market philosophy that deprecates state intervention and is concerned only with cutting the costs of government without any regard for the consequences. This has been exacerbated by Boris’s personal inclination to what might be politely termed a laid-back, hands-off attitude towards his duties as Mayor. It has resulted in a lethargic, non-interventionist administration which stands in sharp contrast to the energetic, proactive approach of Ken’s mayoralty.

As the scandal of the India offices shows, this combination of laissez-faire and laziness is proving seriously damaging to the interests of London.

Almost immediately into the government’s 5-year term, in February we heard stories of a mutiny amongst the military in Dhaka which sent alarm bells ringing and raised fears that the military had once again taken control of the country. It transpired that rank-and-file soldiers from the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Rifles were revolting against their officers and not against the new civilian government. This was met with some relief but the aftermath of the mutiny has caused controversy.

For example, Amnesty International has raised concerns about justice for the alleged mutineers currently on trial in Bangladesh (download their report here). In truth the suspects are fortunate that they have not been court-martialled and are being charged through civilian courts rather than by the army, as clearly officers wanted to take matters into their own hands. Furthermore, it appears that officers have somehow got involved in the prosecution of these suspects if the allegations of mistreatment in detention are to be believed. The officers should be told quite clearly to go back to the barracks and let the civilian courts get on with it.

It is not only the trials of the mutineers that have kept the courts busy, as the government had immediately to deal with some unfinished business, namely prosecuting the assassins responsible for the deaths of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family on the 15th of August 1975.  The court case was successfully concluded in mid-November with death sentences confirmed on those convicted. The challenge now is to get them back to Bangladesh as some of them are abroad.

Prosecutions are also imminent in connection the war crimes committed by those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the war of liberation in 1971. The government was given a popular mandate during the election last year to deal once and for all with this issue which has been hanging over Bangladeshi politics since the creation of the state. Thankfully the cases will start around February or March 2010 and will also undoubtedly have an impact on internal politics with the Bangladeshi community in the UK.

So where in the world but Bangladesh would mutineers, assassins and war criminals feature so dramatically in a single year of the nation’s political life? That’s one reason why I’ll continue to take interest in the politics of my ancestral home even though sadly I no longer have my father to tell me what’s happening out there.

Nor was it clear what he was doing there. Telling the world how London shows the way with retrofitting public buildings and promoting electric cars is all very well, but Boris can take little credit for the former policy, which was launched under the previous Mayor. As for electric cars, it is not at all clear that the Mayor is in a position to lead on this, given that the vast majority of charge points will have to be on suburban roads controlled by local authorities and not on the TfL red routes where we rightly have little off-street parking. And Boris fails to explain what the source of supply for the electricity will be. Is it to be from renewable energy sources or from the sources we are already using? If the latter, then even if electic cars would reduce noise and air pollution they would contribute little to reducing our carbon emissions.

And whilst Boris is preaching to the world about London’s achievements, we should not lose sight of the fact that, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recently published European Green City Index, we are only a middle ranking city when it comes to greenery – in 11th place, just behind Paris. That’s the reality: in the European cities league table we occupy an equivalent position to Fulham or Sunderland in the Premier League, not Chelsea or Man United. Quite honestly only the host city Copenhagen, which comes out top of the Green City Index, is entitled to go preaching to the rest of the world on what cities can do to reduce their residents’ combined carbon footprint.

While he has a look at the tables in the Green City Index and London’s position in them, Boris should also take time out to reconsider his neo-Malthusian views on population growth as a cause of potential environmental catastrophe. (“We are replicating too fast,”, he tells his Telegraph readers, “hurtling towards nine billion souls on the planet like bacteria multiplying on a Petri dish.”) While the Evening Standard has highlighted how this does not fit very well with Boris himself having four kids (which of course is a personal choice), a more fundamental criticism is that the perspective of disaster caused by rising population has been discounted on numerous occasions before in history.

As I wrote about advocates of neo-Malthusianism in an earlier post:

“What they do not want to admit is that the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less, the magic number consistent with stable population, and that it’s expected to fall below this level between 2020 and 2050. (See the recent article in the Economist.) That’s not surprising as poor countries are going through the same demographic transitions that rich ones went through, but at an earlier stage in their development and much more quickly.

“As for environmental damage, the poorest people in the world like the Bangladeshis are producing at most 0.3 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita annually, whereas a US citizen produces 20 tonnes. So, while it’s clear that if the poor countries recreate the same consumption patterns as the US we will certainly have some problems to deal with in the future, at present that is a distant prospect. It is the environmental damage caused by the developed countries that is the immediate challenge.”

Boris’s time in Copenhagen would have been better occupied advocating that cities should be party to any agreement, given that 75 per cent of the CO2 emissions originate from cities and the human race has reach a point now that 50 per cent of it now lives in these huge urban centres. Particularly now that nation states have proved unable to agree amongst themselves on the way forward after the Kyoto agreement, Boris should be calling for cities to step into the breach. Now that would be some leadership!

Speaking at a meeting of its Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation at Istanbul in November, Bangladeshi president Zillur Rahman called on the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to take a lead in combating climate change and in supporting countries like Bangladesh that are fighting the consequences of global warming, even though they make little contribution to its causes. Up to now, however, the OIC’s record on this has been poor.

A 2007 study concluded that the rich Arab states in the OIC had been reluctant to take a lead on addressing climate change: “… efforts by wealthier Muslim states are imbalanced with many of them doing very little and not acknowledging the urgency of the issue. Saudi Arabia, who holds most of the purse strings of the OIC, has long been a sceptic of climate change.” Indeed, the response of Saudi Arabia’s lead climate change negotiator at Copenhagen, Mohammad Al-Sabban, to the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was: “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.”

Looking at annual CO2 emissions per capita in the Gulf states (International Energy Agency figures for 2007), it is immediately apparent that the figures are much worse than even for the United States, which is usually seen as the villain of the piece. For example, Qatar’s annual emissions stand at 58.01 tonnes per capita, the United Arab Emirates’ at 29.91 tonnes, Bahrain’s at 28.23 tonnes and Kuwait’s at 25.09 tonnes, whereas the figure for USA is 19.10 tonnes. These emissions are even more astonishing when compared with the figure for Bangladesh, which stands at 0.25 tonnes per capita. It does make you wonder what is being done in these rich Arab Gulf states to produce such huge CO2 emissions.

As for discussions on climate change amongst the Arab states, here again the problem is the reluctance of the ruling elites in oil-rich countries to support any measures that might reduce demand for oil and petrol. This despite the fact that the Middle East is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures, with vast areas of agricultural land between Egypt and Iraq expected to lose fertility as a result of global warming.

In November, at the launch of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) report on climate change in Cairo, UNFPA officials pointed out that 15% of people in the Arab world already have limited or no access to potable water and that water scarcity induced by climate change was expected to cut food production in the region by half. They called for more cooperation between the Arab League, UNFPA, and Arab NGOs to help governments draw up appropriate policies.

A report released in November by the Lebanon-based Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) criticised the near complete lack of research data on climate change in Arab countries and called on Arab nations to immediately draw up adaptation and mitigation plans. One of the authors stated that “we have no data about the effects the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will have on our coastal zones, even though we know they are very vulnerable”, adding that this makes creating plans to reduce risks from climate change difficult.

Not surprisingly, we have come to expect very little from the OIC in such global environmental summits as we are seeing in Copenhagen this week, where the negotiations on behalf of the developing world are undertaken by the G77 plus China. We hear much talk about the importance of the ummah as the basis for international unity among Muslims, but the oil-rich states have so far shown little sense of unity with their co-religionists over such a critical issue for mankind as climate change and global warming.

In addition to the conference of the parties reaching an agreement on limiting global warming to 2C over pre-industrial levels, the other bone of contention at the Copenhagen Summit is clearly money. That is, how much wealthy countries will be paying poor ones to help them deal with climate change. Given the huge sovereign funds that many of the oil-rich Muslim-majority states are sitting on, derived essentially from the sale of hydrocarbons, and given that the burning of these fuels makes a major contribution to greenhouse gases, you might think the oil producers would feel some moral obligation to the nations who suffer the consequences of global warming.

Moreover, at present the huge funds that the oil-producers possess are usually invested into property and assets in the developed world, when investment in the developing world in green industries and the low carbon economy could well give them better returns and certainly a better conscience. Now that would be a grand idea for all those funds standing idle in bank accounts in the world’s major cities. In the meantime, some zakat to those on the front line of climate change in countries like the Maldives and Bangladesh is surely not too much to ask.

Published in the Jakarta Globe, 16 February 2010