Sir, The Times headline of May 19, 1989, “Clarke attacks BMA ‘scare’ adverts on reforms” and “Minister uses Nazi gibe to attack opponents on GP supersurgeries” of June 9 this year have something in common. They reflect the same problem for a government on the wrong track. The BMA has looked at what is happening, can see the truth, is exposing it, and is being castigated for doing so.

Kenneth Clarke introduced an internal market to the NHS — the BMA wanted pilot studies. Nine years later the architect of the internal market, Professor Alain C. Enthoven, commenting on the shambles that followed Clarke’s reforms, said: “The Big Bang approach to health services reform, be it internal market or PCTs, is a mistake.” He blamed the chaotic situation in the health service in 1999 on Clarke’s insistence on imposing an untried, untested and, in the end, unworkable system on it.

For Alan Johnson to raise the “opposition” of the BMA to the NHS in 1946 is a travesty of history. The association opposed the detail of the service, not the concept, and history proved it right. On the other hand, for a Labour government to be privatising the NHS through the back door, and probably reintroducing the buying and selling of patient lists through corporate takeovers of private facilities, is enough to make Aneurin Bevan turn in his grave.

Dr John Marks
Chairman, British Medical Association, 1984-90

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