Shadow defence secretary Iain Duncan Smith said the Government had failed to learn the lessons from the military report into the 1967 outbreak, which stated: "In a national emergency of this nature, where no question of strike-breaking or other trade union reaction is involved, the earlier the military can be called in, the better."
He told the Today programme: "If they read it they certainly didn't understand it, or read it with their eyes shut, because every mistake that has been made was made in 1967."
But Junior Agriculture Minister Joyce Quin insisted that military authorities were involved from the first day of the current outbreak.
"There was contact between ministers in MAFF and the Ministry of Defence on February 20, the day the outbreak was first suspected, in order to say 'we may have a serious outbreak and we will need to work together'," she told the programme.
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