At one level it has been a privilege to attend the Danish Presidency Press Trip for the past four days. I’m the first blogger ever to have been allowed to attend, and hopefully not the last. But the whole experience leaves me feeling a little empty, although not quite for the reasons that may be immediately obvious.

Let’s start with what works well. The trip – from my point of view – was impeccably organised. Wifi in all venues, buses to get us everywhere, staff on hand to answer any questions we had. I’m waiting for the Foreign Ministry people to confirm the budget for the trip to me, but it will not be excessive for the journalists trip alone – beyond flight and hotel costs there were not too many other direct expenses. There was some pleasant food, but beyond that most of the events were either provided free, or the press people attended things that were happening anyway. As Jakob Alvi from the Danish Permanent Representation pointed out to me, this is only one of dozens of press visits that the Danish government supports during the Presidency and, for trade or tourism purposes, at other times too.

This then is a critique of a system, not a critique of the specific event I attended.

A key problem lies with the cosy yet dysfunctional relationship between the press, and the administration and politicians. Over the course of the four days we received on the record briefings from 9 ministers in the Danish administration: Margrethe Vestager, Villy Søvndal, Bjarne Corydon, Morten Bødskov, Morten Østergaard, Ole Sohn, Mette Gjerskov, Martin Lidegaard and Nicolai Wammen, and had off-the-record discussions with a few more at a dinner. In addition we heard speeches from Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Donald Tusk, Jerzy Buzek and José Manuel Barroso, and attended a press conference with Thorning and Barroso. We also heard from more than a dozen leaders of businesses of various sorts, with Claus Meyer (founder of Noma) the only one to truly stand out.

That sort of access is unprecedented. However it also seems to be rather useless.

The on the record briefings from ministers were remarkable mostly for their complete absence of content. 8 of the 9 ministers (Agriculture Minister Mette Bjerskov being the only exception) gave little more than simple summaries of the Presidency priorities. The Q&A sessions with the ministers were little better. Søvndal at least showed a little more passion and determination for some issues than others, and was willing to say so when he didn’t know the answers, and Wammen coined the phrase that this was the tap water (i.e. discount) Presidency. But sat writing this blog entry now I cannot recall a single thing Corydon, Bødskov, Østergaard, Sohn or Lidegaard said.

Oddly I don’t actually know who is wasting whose time here. We used up more than 10 hours of ministerial time – could these people have been doing something more useful? Yet conversely 60+ journalists sat and listened to hours of this. Could they have been doing something more worthwhile?

“Why do you bother listening to all of this?” I asked a veteran of a number of these press trips. “In Brussels we wouldn’t,” he said, “but here we’re the guests of the country holding the Presidency.” Why then, I asked, bother to come at all? “To make contacts,” he said, going on to say that these were made in the margins. But surely there is a more efficient way to achieve the same result?

There is also undoubtedly some educational aspect to the event. One correspondent I spoke to had only been in Copenhagen once before – for the UN Climate Negotiations – and was happy to use this trip to heal the scars from his previous visit. Many others had little knowledge of Danish politics and society beyond Forbrydelsen, one even raising the idea of making a ‘Danish politics 101′ presentation at the start of the trip. My knowledge of Denmark and Danish politics, and an excellent Twitter network giving me the gossip on the politicians we were meeting, meant I knew more than the average. But I am a politics nerd I suppose.

The press trip was timed to coincide with the joint meeting of the College of Commissioners and the Danish Government, and the opening ceremony of the Presidency. This was a gala concert at the DR Koncerthuset. The event was a mix of short speeches and classical music played by the DR orchestra, yet the audience was confined to the high and mighty of the Copenhagen political elite. The hall seats 1800 but it was only about a quarter were full. I’m not sure a classical music concert is something for mass public consumption, but here was an opportunity to show a slightly wider audience a little more of the spirit of the Presidency, and this was missed. Here Wammen’s notion of a discount Presidency was not much on show, with expensive canapés and ice sculptures.

Over glasses of wine after the opening one of the most interesting scenes of the trip was played out. Olli Rehn, dour and grey Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, was surrounded by a crowd of journalists. How? Why? It cannot be because he has anything interesting to say, can it? I expressed my surprise to one of the journalists afterwards. Rehn didn’t say anything new or interesting was the reply, but he’s a nice guy. We (meaning the Brussels correspondents) talk about football and go for dinner with him, I was told. I countered that his communications were disastrous and towards the outside world he looks ineffective. This was met with a shrug and a further defence of Rehn as an individual. Are these journalists too close to Rehn to be objective? Or am I – as an outsider – just too cruel? Conversely, I am told that many Brussels correspondents are not altogether enamoured by the High Representative for the EU’s Foreign Policy, and on that one I am with them.

The icing on the cake was today’s Press Conference with PM Thorning and Commission President Barroso. It took place at Bella Center, a 1970s conference centre on the windswept edge of Amager. Throne like chairs – occupied by less than 100 press – sloped up the cavernous room from the impeccable stage with a flower arrangement that must have cost more than I’m paid in a day. The two politicians arrived late and gave us 30 minutes of their time – initial introductions that more or less word for word what they had said the night before followed by just half a dozen questions.

As the howling wind made the Vestas wind turbine spin at speed outside Bella Center, the Presidency flags billowing in the wind below it, it was with a grim face that Thorning discussed today’s announcement that the very same Danish wind turbine company is laying off 2300 workers. No words from the politicians could counteract this very concrete bad news.

The best question at the press conference came from the FT’s Peter Spiegel. Directing his question to Barroso, he neatly connected the Commission President’s campaigns against authoritarianism in Portugal as a young politician with the ongoing constitutional problems in Hungary. Did Barroso, Spiegel asked, think that Viktor Orban as a politician represented European values? Barroso’s answer was a classic, vague fudge. He didn’t mention his own view of Orban at all and instead kept referring to legal process needing to take its course. His words ended up being weaker and more vague than the Commission’s statement on the matter from the day before.

“What did we learn from all that?” I asked one of the journalists at the end. “It’s always like that” he said. So we all pottered off to the cavernous press room to file pieces about what we had just heard, crouching over our laptops and trying to muster up something worthy to say, with every practical need covered except anything noteworthy to actually write about.

So that folks, is a Presidency Press Trip.

UPDATE 16 Jan – @SpiegelPeter has just tweeted:

@jonworth Saw your blog. Found it cheap and self-serving.

16.01.2012 06:45 via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@SpiegelPeter

Peter Spiegel

I’m glad to see Bruno Waterfield (@brunobrussels) and Peter Spiegel (@spiegelpeter) among the names, and also that EUObserver is represented. But what about European Voice (covered by The Economist?) and Quatremer / Libération?

UPDATE: I’m informed that Simon Taylor is from EV. Typo in the list above!

Did you even know Presidencies organise press trips? I didn’t before getting the invite to this.

Anyway, what am I going to try to do? I have the advantage – unlike the rest of the regular journalists on the trip – that I do not have pieces to file to newspapers or radio. I can choose my take, write as little or as much as I like. I’m going to try to give an impression of how a Presidency works, my impressions of the ministers and their level of knowledge of their briefs, and try to determine some of the prospects for Denmark’s stint as Presidency for the next 6 months. The trip features – among other things – briefings with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Foreign Minister Villy Søvndal, Radikale leader Margrethe Vestager, Minister of Finance Bjarne Corydon and Europe Minister Nicolai Wammen. As well as blogging I’ll be tweeting on the hashtag #eu2012dk.

For the sake of openness: my accommodation in Copenhagen is being paid for by the Danish Presidency (and I imagine that is the case for the other journalists attending). I am covering the costs of my own travel. I am not paid to blog or report on this. I am invited to attend thanks to contacts I’ve made in the past with communications people in the Danish Presidency, both in Copenhagen and Brussels.

Comments and questions you would like me to pose are most welcome!

The film above is a short CNN report where Richard Quest looks at how cycling works in Copenhagen, and the new challenges the city faces as a result – cycle congestion. There are plenty of lessons in the film for UK cities in light of new research about cycling in the UK. Basically Brits are not going to take to their bikes in large numbers while they fear the consequences of doing so, and – as Peter Walker argues in a blog entry – this needs kilometres of segregated cycle lanes.

Why then does London Cycling not have this as one of its demands to candidates for Mayor of London at the 2012 elections? One of its 4 options on its 2012 election page – Continental-style high streets – is too wishy-washy in its wording.

The solution for cycling in London is simple but costly – segregate cyclists from traffic wherever possible and people will take to their bikes. Now which candidate(s) will advocate that I wonder?

We have reached agreement on reintroducing customs inspections at Denmark’s borders as soon as possible

This is the centre-right administration in Denmark relying on support from the Dansk Folkeparti.

The BBC report claims that the new controls will not breach the Schengen rules. This means that these checks are not regular border controls, and hence will take place in Denmark only. This may seem like an academic distinction, but to use the example from Brenner, the check would have to take place after the border. This – for those that know Copenhagen – would mean that Öresund trains would be boarded by guards at Kastrup, for checks between there and Main Station. Road checks would have to be somewhere on Danish soil, and the minister’s statement about new electronic number plate reading technology might actually mean they do not stop all cars anyway…

Furthermore all of this gets complex is that Denmark does not have an obligation to show identification to a police officer. As a Dane you only have to state a name and an address, and they can – with reason – ask for a personal number. The answer from a train passenger could just be ‘oh I got on at Kastrup’, whereas the person actually came across the bridge from Malmö. Furthermore the sheer scale of checks – there’s a train every 10 minutes at peak between Malmö and Copenhagen, and a busy dual lane motorway – would require administration (and delay to road passengers) of an enormous scale. It will hence be interesting to see how much of this actually comes to pass.

Then there is of course the open question as to whether border controls actually work anyway… but of course if you’re a right wing party facing elections this autumn then a small issue like that isn’t going to matter to you. Having said that, however the practicalities work out, today is a sad day for the spirit of Schengen.

So the news from the COP15 talks this morning is rather inevitable. The USA and a few other countries have cobbled together some sort of deal, and developing countries (and even – weedily – the European Union) are complaining it’s deeply inadequate. There will be some effort to save face, to try to ‘keep on talking’. Interestingly it was even hard to get China to agree to the notion that other countries can check emissions levels – so will countries even stick to what little they have agreed? Polly Toynbee sums things up rather neatly and pessimistically.

The amount of money needed to get a deal to work is not that high – about $100bn a year. That’s not even the size of the EU budget. It’s less than 1% of the GDP of the world’s developed countries. It’s 1 cent in every dollar, 1 cent in every Euro, 1 penny in every pound. If the EU stopped subsidising farmers we would be half way there. The UK alone has injected $850 billion into its banking sector, about 1/3 of what would be needed for climate investments between now and 2020.

Yet set all of this in the context of a problem that has existed for much longer than we’ve known about climate change, namely development of the world’s poorest countries. I returned to Europe a couple of days ago having spent 8 days in Malawi, including 3 days working for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Malawi, and a long weekend spent at the shore of Lake Malawi at Senga Bay.

The scale of the problems Malawi faces are mind boggling. One of Africa’s smallest countries, 14 million people live in the small sliver of land to the east of Lake Malawi. 80% are under 16 and around 12% have HIV/AIDS (who fill 70% of its hospital beds). The population is largely rural, mostly tiny smallholdings of maize. Life expectancy is just over 43 years at birth. And the developed world has not managed to get its act together to coherently help…

Germany has just doubled its aid for 2010 to Malawi… to €62 million. OK, better than a kick in the teeth, but what can you actually do with that much? The ratio of kids to school teachers in Malawi is 1:200 or so, you could not even rectify that with €62 million, let alone deal with the abject lack of infrastructure.

And yet countries like the UK just don’t get it. The UK aims to reach the UN suggested target of 0.7% of GDP committed to foreign aid by 2014, and a handful of developed countries will reach that target. If the Tories win the election in the UK next year the situation will get worse – take Cameron’s comments about Copenhagen quoted in The Guardian:

The Tory leader said he would support the £1.6bn offered by Brown on behalf of Britain to help with adaptation among developing countries so long as it came from the aid budget.

Seriously, what the f**k is that? We’ll help the rest of the world with either regular development aid or the climate, but not both, and even then the cost is really low. NGOs, the Fair Trade Movement, the protesters in Copenhagen are doing their best. But we need bold political leadership too, leaders who make a compelling case that we’re all better off if injustices are reduced.

Go to Malawi, see it, feel it, and then look yourself in the mirror and say that bailing out RBS is a better use of the UK government’s cash.

For the farmers in the villages beside the road between Lilongwe and Salima, for the little kids in the bus that wave at passers-by, for the stoical babies strapped to their mothers’ backs facing an uncertain future… for those people we need a more just world, and that’s going to cost us. It’s not even as if extra consumption in the developed world even makes us more happy, as Richard Layard so compellingly shows.

I’ll personally be donating 20% of my income from the work I did in Malawi to malaria prevention projects there, and I’m also wondering whether I can commit to giving 20% of my annual income earned in 2010 to charity. If states and politicians cannot contemplate it, then I suppose I can make a personal start?

All pictures: Jon Worth, CC Licence, from my Flickr set from Malawi