A FORMER chief of the defence staff from Crondall has spoken out about the appalling treatment of British servicemen and women both at home and abroad by the Labour government since coming to office 10 years ago. Field Marshall Lord Bramall, who was made a Baron in 1987, has condemned the government for not investing enough money into the armed services and said as a result there are not enough military personnel to adequately perform the jobs they are being asked to do around the world. The outspoken attack on the Labour government came at the end of last week, when Lord Bramall joined four other former service chiefs in accusing Gordon Brown personally of treating the armed forces with contempt and leaving the military with a "desperate funding situation". Speaking in a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Bramall recalled the condition of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 and warned that if something was not done soon today's British Army could end up in the same condition. Lord Bramall said: "The Army is not large enough to the tune of several thousand men. The Government must initiate a surge in what it spends on the armed forces. If there is no surge at all the situation will get infinitely worse." Lord Bramall has drawn parallels between the Iraq war and the Suez Crisis in 1956 and believes the British involvement in a long, drawn-out war in the Middle East could have the same disastrous results as that of the Egyptian campaign 51 years ago. In a interview with Mark Tamhane on the Australian radio station ABC, Lord Bramall said: "I think history is always important, and unfortunately, all too few people in Whitehall really understand and mind about history. But the parallels are that the whole cry at the time was that Nasser had to be toppled. He was the incarnation of evil, he was the re-run of Hitler, and unless he was got rid of, the whole world would go down a slippery slope. "And so there are similarities, as you can see with Saddam Hussein. I think, in hindsight, Saddam Hussein's an infinitely nastier man, but the same sort of arguments are being used"
