Has the Grim Reaper got your postcode? Readers of the Cancer Atlas, published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, may wonder. It shows big geographical variations in some cancers - and contains important lessons for the public and policy-makers Take cervical cancer. If you are the parent of a teenage girl just embarking on her sexual career, and you live in Liverpool or Hull or any of the towns between, you may begin to worry. Even to get the US to sign up to that will mark some progress.Given the scientific consensus that has now emerged and the clear signs of a warming already under way, however, it is just whistling in the wind. Add to that the more pressing economic concerns about rising oil prices, burgeoning trade deficits, Middle East peace and Afghan drugs that others want the industrialised nations to consider over the next few days, and you can sense how easy it will be to lose the key questions in a welter of well-intentioned promises amounting to very little.Ultimately, it is the follow-up that will matter for this G8 meeting, as for its predecessors The rhetorical part is largely achieved.
Trade is so much more important than aid; but it is also a far more difficult area for the industrialised nations of the G8 to make real concessions Debt relief is a simple promise to make. But trade is complex because concessions will, inevitably, hit the West's producers and manufacturers. In the discussions over the next few days in Gleneagles, it is trade that will provide the real litmus test of the West's intentions.In the same way, there need to be genuine targets set and genuine sacrifice on the part of the industrialised nations to make any sense of the G8's discussions on climate change. As for trade reform, the issue which many feel is the most critical of all for the future of Africa, there seems to be little sign of agreement.That matters because, in all the discussion about Africa's poverty and ill governance, one of the most encouraging signs has been the extent to which Africans themselves seem ready to grasp their own development future if the economic obstacles are removed. That may be true in terms of getting a final communiqu?n which the industrialised nations agree that climate change is for real and that something must be done. Better, says Mr Blair, to keep the US on board and the G8 unitedthan push for agreement to which the world's biggest economy and greatest polluter will never subscribe.
Mr Blair and Mr Brown have already achieved much on debt relief, they have managed to get the Europeans behind a substantial increase in aid and they have encouraged further assistance from a reluctant President Bush, but they are still far short of the kind of aid increases that the Commission for Africa was seeking as essential in its recent report or that the UN proposed in its millennium goals. But this meeting has been special in the extent of the public awareness of the issues, and in particular the debate about Africa and poverty. Much of the credit for this can go to Bono, Bob Geldof and the Live8 concerts. But it is fair to say that Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, have also done much to put this issue centre stage, along with global warming, by a persistent and sustained campaign over the past six months and more. Alas one such was chosen - not by him - for a notable Oxford anthology, but the lightest are very funny. The best should be gathered into a fine posthumous collection."My next book," a book of poems, he said in an interview with The Dark Horse magazine in 2002,is called North Kelvin, after this very agreeable district where I live. The epigraph comes from Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." I don't think I've got 10 more years, I may have five, probably less; but I'll tell you this, a feeling that the tumbril is approaching makes one very well aware of one's immediate whereabouts.Alasdair Gray.