Blame it on Brown

Gordon Brown’s troubled premiership may well be remembered for having provoked some of the most swingeing newspaper headlines in recent memory. In a month where 15 British soldiers have been killed in combat in Afghanistan, including eight this weekend, the Daily Telegraph leads with the headline “Brown’s ‘dereliction’”. The increasing number of British casualties in Afghanistan, which exceed those in Iraq, is blamed on defence budget cuts. Conservative party defence spokesman, Liam Fox, has especially singled out the government’s £1.4billion reduction of the army helicopter budget as “catastrophic” : under-equipped troops being forced to travel by land routes susceptible to Taliban ambush and booby-traps. Brown can expect no comfort even from moderate left, with Independent editoralist Bruce Anderson laying the blame for these deaths at the door of number 10, at a time when the British public increasingly supports the war effort in Afghanistan, up 15 points since 2006 to 46 per cent, according to an ICM poll for the BBC.