The week ahead: Bilderberg 2013 comes to ? the Grove hotel, Watford

The Bilderberg group's meeting will receive greater scrutiny than usual as journalists and bloggers converge on Watford

When you're picking a spot to hold the world's most powerful policy summit, there's really only one place that will do: Watford. I guess the Seychelles must have been booked up.

On Thursday afternoon, a heady mix of politicians, bank bosses, billionaires, chief executives and European royalty will swoop up the elegant drive of the Grove hotel, north of Watford, to begin the annual Bilderberg conference.

It's a remarkable spectacle – one of nature's wonders – and the most exciting thing to happen to Watford since that roundabout on the A412 got traffic lights. The area round the hotel is in lockdown: locals are having to show their passports to get to their homes. It's exciting too for the delegates. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell will hop from his limo, delighted to be spending three solid days in policy talks with the head of HSBC, the president of Dow Chemical, his favourite European finance ministers and US intelligence chiefs. The conference is the highlight of every plutocrat's year and has been since 1954. The only time Bilderberg skipped a year was 1976, after the group's founding chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was caught taking bribes from Lockheed Martin.

It may seem odd, as our own lobbying scandal unfolds, amid calls for a statutory register of lobbyists, that a bunch of our senior politicians will be holed up for three days in luxurious privacy with the chairmen and CEOs of hedge funds, tech corporations and vast multinational holding companies, with zero press oversight. "It runs contrary to [George] Osborne's public commitment in 2010 to 'the most radical transparency agenda the country has ever seen'," says Michael Meacher MP. Meacher describes the conference as "an anti-democratic cabal of the leaders of western market capitalism meeting in private to maintain their own power and influence outside the reach of public scrutiny".

But, to be fair, is "public scrutiny" really necessary when our politicians are tucked safely away with so many responsible members of JP Morgan's international advisory board? There's always the group chief executive of BP on hand to make sure they do not get unduly lobbied. And if he is not in the room, keeping an eye out, then at least one of the chairmen of Novartis, Zurich Insurance, Fiat or Goldman Sachs International will be around.

This year, there will be a great deal more "public scrutiny" of Bilderberg. Pressure from journalists and activists has won concessions from the venue: for the first time in 59 years there will be an unofficial press office, staffed by volunteers, on the grounds. Several thousand activists and bloggers are expected, along with photographers and journalists from around the world.

Back in 2009 there were barely a dozen witnesses – harassed and arrested by heavy-handed Greek police. This year there is a press zone, police liaison, portable toilets, a snack van, a speakers' corner – all the ingredients for a different Bilderberg. A "festival feel" has been promised. If you are concerned about transparency or lobbying, Watford is the place to be next weekend. Whether the delegates reach out to the press and public remains to be seen. Don't forget, they've got their hands full carrying out the good works of Bilderberg. The conference is, after all, run as a charity.

If you've been wondering who picks up the tab for this gigantic conference and security operation, the answer arrived last week, on a pdf file sent round by Anonymous. It showed that the Bilderberg conference is paid for, in the UK, by an officially registered charity: the Bilderberg Association (charity number 272706).

According to its Charity Commission accounts, the association meets the "considerable costs" of the conference when it is held in the UK, which include hospitality costs and the travel costs of some delegates. Presumably the charity is also covering the massive G4S security contract. Fortunately, the charity receives regular five-figure sums from two kindly supporters of its benevolent aims: Goldman Sachs and BP. The most recent documentary proof of this is from 2008 (pdf), since when the charity has omitted its donors' names (pdf) from its accounts.

The charity's goal is "public education". And how does it go about educating the public? "In furtherance of these objectives the International Steering Committee organises conferences and meetings in the UK and elsewhere and disseminates the results thereof by preparing and publishing reports of such conferences and meetings and by other means." Cleverly, it disseminates the results by resolutely keeping them away from the public and press.

The charity is overseen by its three trustees (pdf): Bilderberg steering committee member and serving minister Kenneth Clarke MP; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard; and Marcus Agius, the former chairman of Barclays who resigned over the Libor scandal.

Labour MP Tom Watson remarks: "If the allegations that a cabinet minister sits on the board of a charity that discreetly funds a secretive conference of elites are true then I hope the prime minister was informed. It was David Cameron who heralded the new age of transparency. I hope he asks Kenneth Clarke to adhere to these principles in future." At the very least, George Osborne and Clarke may consider adhering to the ministerial code when it comes to Bilderberg and declare it in their list of "meetings with proprietors, editors and senior media executives" as they've failed to do in the past. Of course, with the lobbying scandal in full spate it's possible our ministers will steer clear of such a major corporate lobbying event. We'll find out on Thursday.

• Charlie Skelton is the script editor of 10 O'Clock Live, a writer on Have I Got News for You and a fan of Bilderberg since 2009. He'll be tweeting from Bilderberg Watford from @deYook

• Bilderberg
• Kenneth Clarke

Charlie Skelton

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Britain and the euro: what if we'd joined?

Ten years after Gordon Brown decided the UK should stay outside the eurozone, imagine the alternative scenario …

Ten years ago this week, it was euro crunch time for Britain. Gordon Brown had promised an assessment of whether the UK met his five tests for entry into the single currency within two years of the 2001 election. He met the deadline almost to the day.

The conclusion was never really in doubt. Brown did not think the UK should join the single currency and the Treasury analysis provided him with strong arguments to fend off the much more enthusiastic Tony Blair.

Four of the five tests, including the two most important ones involving sustainable convergence and economic flexibility to withstand shocks, were failed. And that was that. Pro-euro cabinet members such as Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt grumbled that the decision had been a Treasury stitchup, but Brown's position was unassailable. Euro membership was off the agenda for the foreseeable future.

A jolly good thing too, of course. The euro has proved to be exactly the job-destroying, recession-creating, undemocratic monster the doubters always warned it would be. This was not the received wisdom on the left at the time, when to suggest that the euro would be supercharged monetarism, Thatcherism with knobs on, was deemed unseemly. People who liked the euro were civilised, supported the arts, went to Tuscany or the Dordogne for their holidays. People who didn't like the euro drove white vans decorated with the flag of St George.

Today, it is hard to find even the most fervent euro enthusiasts in the Liberal Democrat party arguing for UK membership of the single currency. Disillusionment with what was once called "the Project" is almost total in the face of grinding austerity, a double-dip recession that has already lasted 18 months and a jobless rate of 12.2% and rising.

Imagine for a moment that Nick Clegg, Ken Clarke and Tony Blair had triumphed back in 2003. Let's do one of Niall Ferguson's virtual history exercises and think through what would have happened had Brown been overruled and UK entry into the single currency fixed for 2005.

Stage one would have been the transition from the pound to the euro. The most important part of this process, to fix the right level for the pound to join at, proved quite a test for the new chancellor, Charles Clarke, the man chosen by Blair to replace Brown, who was now sitting on Labour's backbenches.

Sterling had already been overvalued in the early 2000s, with hot money attracted into London by a combination of relative high interest rates and a prolonged period of strong growth. The UK government feared that joining the euro at the wrong rate would penalise British manufacturers, while those already in the single currency were concerned that too cheap a rate for sterling entry would hand an added competitive advantage to the UK's strong financial services sector. Despite attempts by the new governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, to drive down the level of the pound, when the time came for the euro to be adopted it was clear that the exchange rate was too high. That, said Britain's new partners in the single currency, was the penalty paid for failing to join from the outset.

Stage two of the process would have been the bubble phase. Having ceded the right to conduct its own monetary policy, the UK had to accept the interest rate the European Central Bank (ECB) set for the eurozone as a whole. As one of the bigger members of the club, Britain carried weight at the discussions in Frankfurt, but monetary policy proved to be far too loose for a country already in the early stages of a housing boom and where the balance of trade was deteriorating year by year.

As in Spain and Ireland, a spectacular bubble developed in the housing market, fuelled by excessively low lending rates, an "anything goes" mentality among lenders and lax regulation. Even outside the euro, the UK had quite a boom going in the housing market in the mid-2000s. Inside, it would have been like the wild west.

When the crash came in 2007 it was a spectacular one. The financial markets imploded, the banks stopped lending and cheap credit dried up. The housing market collapsed, unemployment rose, tax receipts shrivelled and the government's budget deficit went through the roof. Speculation that the UK might leave the euro, as it had left the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, meant investors demanded a high premium for holding UK government debt. Benchmark bond yields rose, first to 5%, then to 6%. When they hit 7%, Blair had no choice but to ask for help from the troika – the International Monetary Fund, the ECB and the EU.

Severe conditions were attached to the loan, the biggest the IMF had ever organised, including deep cuts in welfare and pensions and wage reductions across the public sector. Deprived of the safety valve of currency depreciation, Britain had no choice but to do what Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal were doing and drive down domestic costs to make the economy more competitive.

Unlike in Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal, however, there was no deep attachment in Britain to Europe as a political identity. Far from it. As a result, the buildup to the general election of 2010 was marked by street protests even more widespread and angry than the poll tax riots of 1990. The opposition Conservative party went into the campaign pledging a referendum on whether Britain should leave the euro and won by a landslide. The number of Labour MPs fell to under 100, its worst performance since the 1930s. Nigel Farage's UK Independence party made spectacular gains.

In the referendum that followed the election, the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of exit. The financial markets responded by selling the bonds of any other eurozone country struggling to cope with the rigours of austerity programmes demanded by the European commission in Brussels and the ECB in Frankfurt. By then, that meant pretty much every country apart from a hard core that included Germany, Austria and Finland.

The market turbulence caused by Britain's exit proved terminal for the euro. Bond yields rose sharply across the single currency as investors realised they had underpriced the risks of a country leaving the club. Outside the euro, life was not exactly a bed of roses for the UK, but after a deep and painful recession economic recovery began.

That, in short, is what would have happened had Blair won and Brown lost in 2003. The boom would have been bigger and so would the bust. Britain would have destroyed the euro on departure, and would now be on the point of leaving the EU altogether. The idea that Farage might be the next prime minister would be quite credible.

• Economic policy
• Economics
• Euro
• European Union
• European monetary union
• Currencies
• European Central Bank
• Europe
• Eurozone crisis
• Banking
• European banks
• Financial crisis
• Financial sector

Larry Elliott

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