Deputy prime minister invokes the memory of his late grandfather, who edited journal of the BMA – which fought the creation of the NHS
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Nick Clegg said that his late grandfather, a legendary editor of the BMJ, would have supported the NHS reforms. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Nick Clegg today invoked the memory of his grandfather, Dr Hugh Clegg, as he tried to shore up support for the government's NHS reforms.
Hugh Clegg – as James Kirkup points out at the Daily Telegraph – was a major figure in the medical profession as the editor of the British Medical Journal from 1947 to 1965.
Today, the deputy prime minister told health charity workers that his grandfather, who retired as the editor of the BMJ two years before the Lib Dem leader was born in 1967, would have been supportive of the NHS reforms.
This is what he told a Downing Street seminar this morning:
I reckon that he would have recognised a lot of what we're talking about.
The NHS was always supposed to be a service which is quite diverse, which involves communities, which involves people like you, which draws on the community and volunteering spirit.
And in many ways I think we're almost trying to return some of what to do with the NHS to some of its original aspirations.
This is not a revolution we're introducing, it's an evolution of trends and principles that have been in the NHS from its very foundation. I genuinely believe what we're trying to do is safeguard, not disrupt, precisely what the NHS was always planned to establish in the first place.
But is he right? The BMJ is the journal of the British Medical Association, which is strongly opposed to the NHS reforms. The BMA is one of the most effective trade unions in the country, and jealously protects the interests of its members in the medical profession.
As the guardian of the interests of doctors, the BMA is highly conservative and often resistant to reform. It fought tooth and nail against Nye Bevan's campaign to create the NHS in the 1940s.
Hugh Clegg was appointed as the BMJ's deputy editor in 1934, becoming editor in 1947, a year before the foundation of the NHS.
During this time, the BMA feared that nationalising the charity hospitals and former poor law hospitals run by local authorities would jeopardise the independence of doctors.
This is what Alfred Cox, a former BMA official, said at the time:
I have examined the bill, and it looks to me uncommonly like the first step, and a big one, to national socialism as practised in Germany. The medical service there was early put under the dictatorship of a 'medical fuhrer'. The bill will establish the minister for health in that capacity.
The deadlock was broken when Lord Moran, Winston Churchill's physician and the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, embarked on negotiations between Bevan and the profession.
Bevan compromised on GPs' salaries and allowed consultants to maintain beds in nationalised hospitals for private patients and to receive a state salary.
This prompted Bevan's famous description of his negotiations with the consultants:
I stuffed their mouths with gold.
So it is unclear whether Hugh Clegg, who died in 1983, would be siding with the government. We do know one thing about him, however. He was a caring man who showed a generous side by encouraging younger people in the profession.
My grandfather, who is also a doctor, went along to see him just after the end of the second world to ask about a job at the BMJ. Clegg was then deputy editor and my grandfather, Ian Douglas-Wilson, was a 33-year-old looking for work after serving as a doctor in the war.
I recently chatted to my grandfather about his encounter after Clegg mentioned his grandfather on Desert Island Discs. My grandfather said Hugh Clegg could not have been more friendly and helpful.
But Hugh Clegg offered some important advice. He told my grandfather he was far too radical for the BMJ and should instead work for rival medical journal the Lancet.
My grandfather did just that and spent the rest of his career there, becoming editor in 1965 – the year Hugh Clegg retired from the BMJ.