Cathy Newman
speaker
18 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard Dec 2010
Cathy Newman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm Cathy Newman.
I'm political correspondent for Channel 4 News and I run the Fact Check blog.
I haven't just focused on one figure, but a whole range of figures from the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that I think sounded a little bit dodgy.
On the 10th of March at Prime Minister's Questions this year, he made quite a startling claim.
So his figures didn't sound quite right to me.
So I phoned the MOD and prized some figures out of them.
And they showed that in real terms, so that's including inflation, the defence budget actually fell year on year on four occasions since 1997.
Now, the MOD then said, well, Gordon Brown wasn't talking about real terms.
He was talking about near cash, which means not taking into account inflation.
But that wasn't what Gordon Brown said in PMQs.
He was quite clear that spending on defence had risen year on year in real terms.
A week later, Prime Minister's questions again.
What's interesting, under Labour, so from 1997 until 2010, the defence budget had risen overall during that period by nearly 10%.
Now, some would say, well, there's been five wars to fight.
But I think what's interesting is that under the coalition government, even though we're still at war in Afghanistan, over the next four years, the defence budget will fall by nearly 8%.
That's a real terms reduction, again, taking into account inflation.
So if you think that Gordon Brown came under fire from the top military brass for not increasing the defence budget every year, year on year, the coalition government, I think, is going to find itself also in the firing line for cutting the defence budget.
It was the only England goal in a World Cup game covered by ITV.
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