Only defuse. That seemed to be the approach of all three participants in the Daily
Politics’ foreign affairs debate this afternoon. The frequent questions from Andrew Neil and Mark Urban put David Miliband, William Hague and the Lib Dems’ Ed Davey on the collective back
foot. It was all they could do to take some of the sting out of proceedings.
In Miliband’s case, that meant Iraq and defence spending. On the former, he started with one of the bluntest statements we’ve heard from any government minister on the issue: “If we knew then what we know now,” he said, “we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq.” You can see the thinking: distance the Brown Government from Blair’s War. But I imagine most people will regard this simply as admission of culpability from Labour. And as for equipping our troops, Miliband recited his lines from the Brown copybook: saying that defence spending has risen in real terms over the past 13 years.
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