Brown must be recalled to Chilcot

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has called for Gordon Brown to be recalled to clarify his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry.

Fox has written to Sir John Chilcot to ask for the recall because former defence chiefs have directly contradicted Brown's evidence.

"There have been so many other witnesses whose evidence directly contradicted his, concluding with Bill Jeffrey today, that there is a clear case for questioning Gordon Brown again", he said.

Writing in the letter to Sir Chilcot, he said: "I fully understand why you do not want your inquiry to be invoved with party politics, but I do think that it is important to get the truth in this matter even if this cannot happen until after the election."

Amongst those contradicting Gordon Brown are:

• Lord Guthrie: "The military wanted to do many things but because of his attitude they were unable to fund properly the Strategic Defence Review (1998) which the Cabinet had approved, especially at a time when other departments were being showered with money. The Ministry of Defence received the bare minimum from the chancellor, who wanted to give the military as little as he could get away with. The increases that we had in budget were small and did not take into account the above-inflation cost rises of defence.... [Brown] cannot get away with saying, 'I gave them everything they asked for', that is simply disingenuous".
• Lord Boyce: "He’s dissembling, he’s being disingenuous. It’s just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed. There may have been a 1.5 per cent increase in the defence budget but the MoD was starved of funds" (The Times, 6 March 2010).
• General Dannatt: "Implementation of that otherwise excellent [Strategic Defence] Review was hobbled from the start by the Treasury under Gordon Brown not only not fully funding the outcome of the Review, but imposing a three per cent year on year efficiency savings target. To that deficient baseline needs to be added the reopening of the MoD's budget in 2003, a re-examination of the rules and the effective removal of a £1 billion year on year... Furthermore, despite the Government increasing the headline figure of the defence budget on an annual basis, the uplift to match general inflation was below that of defence inflation, which habitually runs at several percentage points higher. So the net effect over recent years has been that the real value of the defence budget has decreased every year, and the pressure on the MoD and the Armed Forces has increased... no amount of rewriting history can compensate for the years when he neither understood defence properly nor was persuaded to pay for it fully".