Editor's blog Wednesday 21 September 2011: BMA Council backs chair Dr Hamish Meldrum

Another psalter is inscribed in The Book Of Things That Are Not Surprising, with the news that BMA Council has today given its full backing to its chair Dr Hamish Meldrum.

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I could not have been less surprised to learn that the motion of censure at the BMA London LMC meeting last week was tabled by BMA Council member Dr Anna Athow.

Health Policy Insight readers may already know that Dr Athow is a prominent member and former Parliamentary candidate of the Workers Revolutionary Party. You can learn about the WRP's views Trotskyite politics here, if you so wish.

Dr Athow is undoubtedly an ornament to the gaiety of the health policy conversation. BMA members have a proud tradition of electing members to Council who will ensure that the BMA's leadership do not have everything their own way. Such checks and balances can be fruitful.

The fruitful checking of executive power needs, however, to beware that it does not turn into a rotten apple.

Hamish Meldrum is widely agreed to have led the BMA - politically a broad church, to put it mildly - with distinction through a challenging period. He has kept them in the policy conversations in a way that a more self-gratifying oppositional approach would have resolutely failed to do.

Had the BMA moved to total opposition to the Health Bill earlier in the process, many of the medical politicians of the further left would have been thrilled. So would Andrew Lansley (saviour, liberator) and colleagues: the BMA would have backed themselves into a corner in a most obliging manner.

They have not made such a mis-step.

If someone were wanting to take on the BMA and win, they would research the BMA's divisions and accentuate and attack them remorselessly.

BMA members at all levels of the organisations ought to reflect on that, before fighting amongst themselves.