If ever the world needed a successful G8 summit, it is now.

The credit crunch is wreaking financial havoc, prices of oil and food are spiralling and recession looms large in Britain and the U.S.

If any international body could seriously address these problems it is the G8, conceived in 1975 as a direct response to global inflation.

The problem, of course, is that G8 has a dismal track record.

G8 leaders discuss the world food crisis ... and chow down on an 18-dish dinner

Remember the heady promises made at Gleneagles on reducing poverty in Africa?

The brutal truth is that in the past three years little or nothing has been achieved. And, so far, this session has not started promisingly.

It may be a cheap shot, but there is something terribly symbolic in the fact that a day which began with Gordon Brown making a plea for frugality in Britain should end with a lavish eight course, 18-dish dinner, with the finest champagne and wine flown to Japan from France, California and Hungary.

Global food crisis? Climate change? Let them eat cake.

Nannyish it may be, but Mr Brown is right that throwing away four million tons of food every year, adding £420 to a household's shopping bills, is wasteful.

But the truth is Mr Brown would be better served buttonholing G8 European leaders to address once and for all the EU's grotesque Common Agricultural Policy.

Scrapping this wasteful, discredited system of farm subsidy  -  which encourages the expensive production of food we do not need  -  would yield far greater benefits than encouraging Britain to recycle its scraps.

Meanwhile, we can only hope G8 ends more productively than it has begun.

Blunted reforms

Nothing is more deadly serious than the nihilistic knife culture now gripping parts of Britain.

So how do our politicians react?

Yesterday, David Cameron was reported saying all caught carrying blades should automatically face jail, only for his proposal to be watered down later in the day to a mere presumption of imprisonment.

Jack Straw, not to be outdone, insisted that controversial new sentencing guidelines, which will allow some knife carriers to escape with a community punishment, would be reviewed.

But later his officials cast doubt on how soon this would be.

 The Mail accepts there are no easy answers to this terrible problem, but we know that:

(1) There is no space left in our packed jails for anyone, let alone those who carry knives

(2) There are not enough police on the streets to enforce such a policy

(3) While putting 16-year-olds behind bars would offer the public protection, it's a sure way of criminalising them for life.

Yes, there are no easy answers. But, equally, there should be no glib proposals.

Politicians of all parties need to tackle the real problem: Britain's broken society.

A comedy of errors

Who would be a child today? By the time they can fasten a shoelace, most youngsters will have received lessons in sex education, the perils of drug abuse and racism.

Today, we learn Shakespeare, that master of bloody tragedy, is to be taught to six-year-olds.

Please do not misunderstand us. The Bard has a place in education.

But couldn't Hamlet, sex, drugs and race wait a few years, while our children enjoy their all too precious years of innocence?