With Climate At "Core" Of UK Foreign Policy, Beckett Comes To DC

[hatrack]

On her first official visit to Washington since being appointed British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett put climate change at the heart of UK foreign policy, even as she acknowledged differences with the Bush administration on the issue.

"There are disparate voices on that in the United States," she told an audience at the School of Advanced International Studies but denied that her comments were intended as a critique of US policy. "It's meant to just be a statement of where we are. I wouldn't venture to tell the United States where it ought to be."

ED. - No, we wouldn't want to do that, now would we Margaret?

Mrs Beckett set out a sweeping national security agenda that suggested the need to tackle energy, climate, water and food security. "If we respond to the global imperative of climate change the right way, we can reinforce global security," she said. When she was appointed foreign secretary last month, Mrs Beckett said Tony Blair, the British prime minister, wanted to make climate change a "top strategic priority for the Foreign Office, to be mainstreamed through our work and through our diplomatic concerns".

That focus was underlined by the fact that John Ashton, appointed two weeks ago at the Foreign Office as special representative for climate change, attended all the meetings with Ms Beckett. He also had a separate meeting at the White House with John Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

EDIT

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=FT&Date=20060710&ID=5855738