It’s a lot harder to protest against the G7 rich man’s club, now that it’s the G20.

The agenda is somewhat more murky when it is China refusing to discuss climate finance, rather than the UK or the US.

So you could pass such protests off as an irrelevance.

As it happens, within the real meeting, one of the main aims of these campaigners – the Tobin tax – was getting the biggest boost it has ever received.

The idea that global currencies trades, capital flows and other trades could be subject to a small percentage tax has been a longstanding pipedream for development campaigners. It has two purposes.

To throw sand in the wheels of speculative activities (the description of Nobel prize-winning US economist James Tobin in 1978), dampening down its worst excesses.

And also to raise around half a trillion dollars for something: global poverty, climate change, debt relief, AIDS, malaria: take your pick.

Gordon Brown’s espousal of it, among four long term responses to the credit crunch, was a shock.

It is a proposal that has long interested economists.

Lord Turner was slapped down after musing about it in the summer in an interview with Prospect.

But there was a reference to the policy at the Pittsburgh G20 leaders conference. And let’s not forget that these days with it being the G20 and not the G7, the likes of Brazil are already around the top table with policies such as a 2 per cent tax on capital flows.

Eight years ago I chanced upon an unlikely source of support for a tax on speculative activities: George Soros.

‘I’m in favour of the Tobin tax. It doesn’t happen to coincide with my personal interest, but it could be a very good source of funds for providing global [public] goods,’ he told me in 2001 when I was Economics Correspondent at The Observer.

The main critique has been that it was impractical, and impossible to enforce if not agreed by the whole world.

Well, that appears to be the Prime minister’s agenda.

Though it’s worth knowing that a previous French proposal to study a Tobin tax to fund the Millennium Development Goals was vetoed at a G7 meeting, while Gordon Brown was chancellor.

Of course this is a highly political move.

George Osborne has outflanked the government on being tough on bonuses. He is desperate not to be seen as friendlier to bankers that Mr Darling and the Prime minister.

In an election Labour will be keen to paint him as an banker- loving Tory.

So he will tread carefully around this policy issue. Of course the banking lobby is against it. But the international community is not as against some form of this idea as you might think.

Having “saved the world economy” in Act 1, Act 2 appears to be the no less thorny task of saving the world itself.

The Chancellor has forced climate finance to the top of the agenda at breakfast tomorrow. The UK/EU plan is for finance worth $100bn per year from 2020, half of which will be raised from the private sector through carbon market mechanisms.

The controversial bit is the other half. Which governments should pay for carbon abatement, mitigation, and percolation of green technologies to fast-growing economies so that they may prosper and grow using the least carbon possible?

The existing developed countries, AKA ‘the North’, AKA ‘the rich’, are responsible for 75 per cent of historic carbon emissions on this planet.

They are by far the cause of the current climate change challenge.

However, as the Chancellor will point out in a speech tonight, 90 per cent of future emissions will come from the emerging and developing countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. The EU plan calls for some sharing of the burden of this 50 billion per year between historic and future polluters.

But here at St Andrews the Chinese in particular are saying No. There had been an attempt to do the heavy lifting work here in preparation for the Copenhagen summit.

The Danish prime minister will gatecrash this meeting alongside the British one. But tonight, all hope of a climate change finance deal here appears to be disappearing. We’ll know more after breakfast.

* The Chinese know all about breakfasts at these summits. When it was the G7 rich man’s club that ruled the roost, and many were complaining about China’s exchange rate policy, they did invite Chinese officials to attend as an observer.

But they were booted out after breakfast whilst the G7 crafted communique after communique that criticised the Renminbi policy. On climate change and elsewhere the BRIC countries are making their voice heard loud.

Brazil’s current policy of taxing capital flows would have been laughed out of a G7 meeting, but will politely accepted tomorrow.

The other major agenda item is building a sustainable world economic system.

Mervyn King has called the global imbalances, which I reported on from China using a dim sum table, the fuel behind the fire of the credit crunch.

The hope from G20 leaders is that the next leg of world growth will be sustainable and balanced, that North American won’t consume 30 per cent of the world’s output and will stop borrowing so much.

And that surplus countries like China will start spending more and stop accumulating three trillion dollar mountains of Forex reserves.

Very very interesting, but slightly academic.

A cynic might say that having “abolished boom and bust” in Britain, this is a rather lofty attempt to abolish boom and bust across the world. But it is heartening that one of the key geoeconomic lessons of this crisis is being learnt at the highest levels.

She described her experience of making the award-winning report on the World News Blog earlier this year.

Also shortlisted for the award were Channel 4’s Find me a Family, and Economy Gastronomy (BBC 2), FYI Radio (lesbian and gay youth radio station) and Pobol y Cwm (BBC Cymru).

Watch the report below:

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UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer says so; a senior EU negotiator says so; even the genially optimistic Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband says so – telling the Commons: “The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well.”

As one European delegate at this last round of talks before Copenhagen told me: “We’re out of time to agree a fully worked-up treaty.”

But they keep on going, these now very familiar faces at UN climate talks. They’re all here – climate campaigners, government officials, business and industry lobbyists.

Milling around, pressing flesh, bending ears, spreading rumours, buttonholing passing negotiators. A word changed here, a clause deleted there, each generates a frisson of excitement or depression; these are the bread and butter of climate change negotiations.

Now, there’s a lot of salvage work going on. The aim is a political agreement, one that is “politically binding” – though that’s something of a slippery concept.

Rich country negotiators and the hosts, the Danish government, say they want something with enough meat in it so Gordon Brown, President Lula of Brazil, who knows, even President Obama, et al can all turn up at the end of the Copenhagen talks and bask in the glory of being seen to save the planet, while leaving the details to be worked out by officials in yet more negotiations.

Negotiations that may take a further six months, though I’ve heard one insider say it could take up to a year.

The more optimistic government delegates – Britain among them – say they’re still pushing for a political agreement with real numbers in it – numbers for emissions cuts by developed countries, numbers for emissions restraint by developing countries, and numbers for the money the rich will pay to the poor to help them deal with the impacts of climate change.

But the frustration of the poor is growing – African nations walked out at the beginning of the week demanding the rich countries start talking turkey. That livened things up. And it has put the rich countries under the spotlight and forced them to start explaining exactly how their much-vaunted offers of targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will actually work.

The problem is, a politically binding agreement can be watered down; it can be evaded and sidestepped. The less meat there is in, the greater wriggle room there is to water it down. And astute negotiators know that, which may explain the British ambition for real numbers in the agreement.

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For this was an event in which the old world of European kings and queens were making way for a citizen of the new world. The man the old world was celebrating was Brazil’s President Lula de Silva.

The bibs and tuckers around the hall – and it was crammed with businessmen, lawyers, bankers and the rest – gave all the impression of supplicants at the great man’s table.

Lula – bearded and younger looking than his 64 years. Charismatic with a real twinkle in his eye, he cut a forceful and persuasive dash as he picked up the Chatham House Prize – a kind of micro Nobel Peace Prize awarded by the UK diplomatic think tank.

His speech majored on climate change and clean energy, but it also made the plea for the world’s 10th largest economy to have its rightful place at the world’s top table – a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

It was a good speech – talked of Brazil’s renewal depending upon the renewal of Latin America itself. Talked too of Brazil’s strength flowing not from its massive new deep sea oil deposits, but from its sustainable energy supplies from sugar cane and its new found determination to sustain the Amazon rain forest at all cost (a campaign likely to prove one of the few tangible outcomes from the Copenhagen climate change summit).

As he delivered his speech I noticed the missing little finger from his left hand – lost in an industrial accident in 1960.

Lula’s life is an extraordinary story from peanut seller and shoes shine boy who grew up in great poverty, to the leader of the huge Metal Workers’ Union and thence in 2002 to the democratically elected president of a country that had basked in its unfair share of corruption and military dictatorship.

Brazil, for all its inequality and development challenges, is a power house of a nation that has come of age. Its thrusting growth is an opportunity for British business. But the headsets listening to the English translation of Lula’s Portuguese spoke volumes of Britain’s lack of readiness to engage.

We shall be hearing much more of Brazil on Channel 4 News in the weeks to come. Can’t yet tell you why, but you won’t be disappointed.

The State department are now advocating a new tactic – where both sides take “baby steps” toward lower level talks because they know there is no chance of getting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to sit down with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu for meaningful discussions anytime soon.

There has been a bit of fuss about whether Hillary Clinton made an error at the weekend when she described an Israeli offer to partially freeze settlement building as “unprecedented” even though it was far short of what the US had originally demanded – a total freeze.

But that wasn’t the real mistake. The biggest error was thinking that the new US administration could force this concession out of the Israelis just because they were asking for it.

Obama came into office determined to make progress on the Middle East and to do it early in his term when he still had fresh political capital to expend on the process. So many other US presidents don’t pay any real attention to the Middle East until they are nearly out of office and seen as lame ducks.

That was a laudable goal from Obama. But there was a level of idealism – some might say naivety – from the administration at the start of this year about how much change they could bring to the world simply because they wanted to. One American diplomat has diplomatically called it an “excess of zeal”.

The Israelis were not so mesmerised by Obama’s election that they were prepared to halt settlement activity just because he asked them to. And in fact Netanyahu has bolstered his popularity inside Israel by refusing to bow to the US demands.

But Abbas was emboldened by the tougher tone coming from Washington and publically announced he would not begin negotiations until there was total freeze. Not only has the US plan not worked – it’s prevented the re-starting of talks.

Despite this impasse President Obama has already been awarded the Nobel peace prize. The committee said it was because Obama had given the world hope for a better future.

But one year after his election it’s maybe time to ask not just if that hope was misplaced – but whether its is getting in the way of action.

It’s not just the Nobel committee who were captivated by what seemed to be the potential in an Obama presidency. Much of the rest of the world was too – along with his own team it seems.

As they say in America “they’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid” and have started believing their own hype too much. Believing that international players would do what they said simply because Obama had asked them to. That’s how they would bring about that Change they promised.

But in the real world it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked in Iran where the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday dismissed Obama’s overtures by saying that talks with America would be “naive and perverted”.

It certainly didn’t work when both Obamas flew into Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago’s Olympic bid. The president didn’t take too much of a hit inside America when that bid failed – he got points for trying.

But what the rest of the world saw was a man (a couple) who thinks they can fix anything just by showing up. A president who thinks he can change the world just by being.

That rock hard self belief has led Obama to try ambitious things others wouldn’t dare. And that’s a good thing. But where does hope end and hubris begin? And when does it stand in the way of making progress?

On the night Obama finally clinched the Democratic nomination for President in Minnesota he promised “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” and he was widely mocked for his arrogance at the time.

Next month he will have the chance to make good on that commitment at the Copenhagen global summit on climate change. But we wait to see how much healing action he will be able to deliver.

There is much speculation about whether Obama will go to Copenhagen in person – and whether he would make a significant difference to the chances of getting a deal.

If he does decide turn up his presence could change the dynamic at the summit. But only if the US comes with a promise of some substantial action as well. Not if Obama thinks he can heal the planet just by showing up.

PRO-WITHDRAWAL: Plaid Cymru, Green Party, the BNP, Respect and UKIP (UKIP specify there must be US agreement first).

PRO-TROOPS STAYING BUT CALLING FOR A RE-THINK: SNP; Liberal Democrats, Conservatives.

There are “real tensions” in the Liberal Democrat parliamentary ranks about their position, an MP told me.

One Lib Dem MP told me he believed that Paddy Ashdown’s outspoken support for the action in Afghanistan was acting like a drag anchor on the party’s position when the logic should be taking the party towards a withdrawalist position.

The Conservatives believe that if they win the election Afghanistan will be one of the decisive issues on which they will be judged. A policy review could follow soon after an election.

As for the government, the real tensions on the Labour benches were glimpsed when former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells went public with a withdrawal call this week but the Prime Minister will tomorrow re-state his position that the troops must stay, the work is vital and protects British people on the streets here.

It’s that last argument that most agnostic/worried MPs you speak to have a problem accepting.

Related: Poll shows the public are losing confidence on Afghanistan

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The Bank has just voted to increase its money creation exercise to £200 billion. A £25 billion increase is a little less than had been expected.

The Monetary Policy Committee is marginally less worried than thought about last month’s shock news that the economy is still in recession. It may be marginally more worried about the prospective inflationary consequences of its epic money creation scheme than the City believed.

What we can say now is that Britain is the undisputed QE world champion, that this policy has been pushed further than any developed country in modern history.

So ‘is QE working?’ is now a £200 billion pound question.

Passing judgement on quantitative easing (QE) is a bit like divining the impact of water fluoridation on Britain’s dental standards. You can see some sparklier teeth in Britain’s credit markets, but is all of that really down to the Bank’s extraordinary experiment?

The most tangible impact has been on the market for government debt, where the Bank of England has gobbled up the extra government debt, lowering the price the Treasury pays by over a full percentage point.

Today’s news saw a sell-off in that market, with that interest rate increasing by 0.1 per cent. The markets clearly see the fact that there will be “just 25 billion” of QE in the next three months, as a high watermark for the policy (QE to date has been running at £25bn every month).

David Cameron warned in his Tory party conference speech that QE had to stop at some point, and only then would we see the true demand for British government debt. We are now close to that point.

So what’s it achieved? Well there has been a flurry of larger companies that have bypassed the stodgy banks, by raising money from capital markets to reduce bank debt. Typically they issue corporate bonds sold to the likes of pensions and insurance companies. This is part of the story of how QE has helped the economy.

But it is impossible to say what proportion of this extra lending has come as a result of the Bank’s experimental policies and what has come from a general improvement in sentiment.

So QE has disproportionately helped larger companies rather than smaller companies. It has helped banks too. It may have helped pump up asset prices around the world. And, indirectly it has clearly contributed to a helpful fall in the value of sterling. Not quite a devaluation, but not a million miles away from it either.

The donkey has been kicking a little in the past few days. There have been some strong manufacturing and services sector survey numbers earlier in the week. But there were more bad numbers out today.

So the question remains about when this policy gets unwound. When does quantitative tightening begin? Well it’s never been done before. And the Bank will want to be completely certain that the donkey is alive and kicking, before they remove its tail.

As part of the QE arrangements the Chancellor and the Bank of England Governor Mervyn King swap letters. Normally it is an eminently forgettable spot of legalese.

Not this time.

The Chancellor chose to use the letter to issue what can only be termed ‘a gentle prod’ aimed at the Bank of England. Mr Darling appears to want the Bank to use QE to lend to companies directly by buying so-called commercial paper. This hasn’t happened so far.

The numbers thinking the Taliban can be defeated are down from 42 per cent to 33 per cent in the space of two weeks.

The poll suggests that the numbers thinking the Taliban cannot be defeated are up from 48 per cent to 57 per cent in the space of two weeks.

Number Ten says the Prime Minister’s acutely aware of the “public debate” and has changed his diary to give a speech tomorrow morning making the case for keeping troops in Afghanistan. The speech isn’t yet written but is not expected to signal a change in policy.

The deaths of British servicemen at the hands of an Afghan policeman were already known about when the polling was conducted yesterday.

That’s leading to a rethink on the ground about how security can be tightened.

Strategically, the Karzai problem is triggering a rethink of its own.

The central government President Karzai runs lacks credibility and reach but there’s no plan B yet developed to side-step him.

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But yesterday’s news day was no ordinary day. The conviction of 23 CIA operatives by the still independent judiciary in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy was a remarkable first.

The CIA staff who included the Milan station chief (What is a secondary European city doing with a CIA station chief at all?) marked a major step in the struggle to bring to justice those responsible for the rendition and torture of suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.

The case involved the seizure of a Muslim cleric on the streets of Milan and his rendition to a ‘third country’ for interrogation, where he claims he was tortured.

None of the convicted CIA people is ever likely to serve the five years in jail to which they have been sentenced (the station chief got eight years).

But the case itself must be bringing closer the day when the political leaders of the time, particularly in Europe and America, will be questioned and perhaps themselves brought before the International Court in the Haig.

My Paris informant identified fears of such investigations against Tony Blair as another ingredient in President Sarkozi’s ‘deceleration’ of support for Mr Blair’s candidacy for the Presidency of Europe.

This brings me to the presence of a 22-seater Gulfstream jet at Birmingham Airport on October 2nd. N478GS was identified there last month by plane spotters.

This is a plane that, according to a report in the Guardian (November 1st) has previously been seen at Bagram military air base in Afghanistan, Shannon in Ireland, Prestwick in Scotland, and Stuttgart in Germany. There have been persistent allegations that the jet has been used for the ‘movement’ of prisoners.

Can we be assured that rendition is not still being practised? The MOD says of the Birmingham incident that the plane’s visit had nothing to do with ‘past allegations’.

They say it was engaged in ‘routine military liaison between allies’.

Isn’t that exactly what the rendition of suspects for torture in third countries could have been described as?