Franco-British deals reached at summit

Thursday 27th March 2008 at 00:00

Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy have announced new co-operation on a range of issues following a mini inter-government summit in London.

As well as the prime minister and the French president, 13 British ministers and their counterparts held talks at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium to discuss bilateral co-operation in a number of areas.

The summit was the political highlight of Sarkozy's two-day state visit to the UK.

Brown and Sarkozy told a press conference that in future the two governments would work more closely on nuclear energy, immigration, climate change and the Darfur conflict.

Sarkozy announced that there would be extra French patrols at ports and more spot-checks for people traffickers to stop illegal aliens entering the UK from France.

On economic issues, the leaders called for greater transparency on the global financial markets, urging banks to make a "full and prompt disclosure" about write-downs in the wake of the credit crunch.

"We agreed the need for greater transparency in financial markets to ensure that banks make full and prompt disclosure of the scale of write-offs, including finding ways to give greater certainty on the valuations of complex financial assets," they said in a joint statement.

At Wednesday's Windsor banquet Sarkozy said: "We have to unite our two countries to recover the influence which was theirs for such a long time."

Sarkozy used his address to Parliament on Wednesday to call for a new era of "brotherhood" between the two countries, suggesting the "old nations" Britain and France could lead the world in dealing with challenges like global warming, globalisation and economic instability.

After decades in which the Paris-Berlin axis has driven the EU, Sarkozy made clear he is relying on British support to push through an agenda focused on climate change, energy, immigration and defence during the six-month French presidency of the Union beginning in July.

Speaking on the day when business secretary John Hutton called for a significant expansion in Britain's nuclear power production, the president said that both the UK and France had "opted resolutely" for nuclear energy, both to secure future supplies and to cut carbon emissions.