Blair wants overhaul of UN to meet 21st-century challenges

Tony Blair set out a sweeping blueprint yesterday for a new international order, built around an overhauled United Nations, an enlarged G8, and a multilateral system for the supply of enriched uranium for peaceful nuclear energy.

Mr Blair's grand design, outlined in aspeech capping his latest session of talks with President George Bush, was entitled "A Moment for Reconciliation".

It was built around a single overarching theme: that the challenges of today's interdependent world meant that countries had to act together and, in some cases, that action had to be pre-emptive not reactive.

A day after he admitted mistakes in the conduct of the war, the Prime Minister again defended the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "The war split the world, now the struggle of Iraq for democracy should unite it," he told an audience of students and faculty members at Georgetown University, urging "a new concord to replace the old contention".

Though Mr Blair did not mention the idea explicitly, British officials said one possibility was an international donor conference to bolster the troubled reconstruction effort in Iraq, now that a democratically elected government was finally in place in Baghdad.

The idea is believed to have featured during talks between the two leaders.

The heart of the Georgetown speech was Mr Blair's vision of a new international institutional system, complete with a more effective system not only to respond to crises, but to head them off in advance. " Increasingly there is a hopeless mismatch between the global challenges we face and the global institutions to confront them," said Mr Blair. New international architecture had been required after the Second World War, he noted. "In this era, we need to renew it."

The centrepiece of what the Prime Minister termed his "tentative suggestions for change" is an overhaul of the United Nations and its sister organisations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and of the G8 group of major powers, now a de facto parallel directorate to oversee world affairs. The plan has six points:

* Security Council changes to bring in countries such as Germany, Japan and India

* New powers for the UN secretary general, especially to appoint top officials in the secretariat and to allocate UN resources

* A possible merger and sweeping reform of the IMF and the World Bank

* A multilateral system for "safe enrichment" for nuclear energy, featuring a "uranium bank" run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

* An expanded G8, that includes China, India and Brazil among others;

* A UN Environment Organisation that reflects environmental issues.

Mr Blair pointed to how unrepresentative the current structure of the Security Council had become. A council "which has France as a permanent member but not Germany; Britain but not Japan; China but not India, to say nothing of the absence of proper representation from Latin America or Africa, cannot be legitimate," he said.

He praised Kofi Annan, who soon will step down as secretary general, but urged a "radical streamlining" of the UN's humanitarian and development work, so that it acted effectively as a single agency in a single country. The next secretary general, Mr Blair said, should have greater power to propose action for the resolution of disputes.

Much the same applied to the World Bank and the IMF, in Mr Blair's view. While the Bank should remain focused on fighting poverty, the IMF "must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries".

As Mr Blair was speaking in Georgetown, the US Capitol was sealed off as police investigated a report of gunfire in the garage of a nearby House of Representatives building. There were no reports of injuries.

The visit has led to a breakthrough in the dispute over the multi-billion pound Joint Strike Fighter project. Progress on the £140bn project has been dogged by wrangles over whether Britain would be given access to the technology powering the hi-tech aircraft.

Ministers are understood to have threatened that the UK could pull out of plans to buy up to 150 of the planes for the RAF and Navy unless the US agreed to transfer secrets about its software that Britain argues are needed in order to run and maintain it. In a statement, the two leaders signalled they had agreed in principle that the UK would be given access to the classified details on conditions of secrecy.