Rather than instigate a referral back of the Kent stroke cuts, Cllr Constantine bizarrely removed herself from the committee in December 2018
Locals will be well aware of the uproar surrounding the plans to close QEQM hospital’s emergency stroke unit in Thanet.
The plans became public in early 2018 and SONIK (Save Our NHS in Kent) sprung into action raising awareness about the plans, analysing the details and making a case to halt the planned closure of 3 out of Kent’s 6 stroke units.
SONIK’s protests began almost immediately, and continued throughout the year, bolstered by a strong social media presence, petitions, weekly street stalls, lots of engagement with the community in Thanet and appearances in the press and on TV.
Fast forward to the end of 2018. SONIK activists had hatched a plan to try to get the unsafe stroke plans ‘referred back’ to the Health Secretary. By working closely with NHS campaigners in Essex, Telford and Dorset, we had realised that one committee within KCC had the power to halt the plans and send them, via the Health Secretary, for review by an independent panel. This had the potential to dilute or even stop the cuts altogether. Our allies in Essex had successfully run a ‘refer it back’ campaign in which they had surprisingly persuaded a committee of (mostly Conservative) councillors to vote in favour of this measure. Initially dismissive councillors had been persuaded by a combination of irrefutable data and a mass public pressure campaign. We were getting ready to do the same.
SONIK on a mission to ‘Refer it Back’
We knew who the councillors on the committee were, and we began to make contact. We also had to find a councillor willing to help us by putting forward a ‘motion of referral back’ when the time came.
Cllr Karen Constantine was on the committee in question – the Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (aka the ‘HOSC’). She also represented Ramsgate, one of the areas that would be most seriously affected by the proposed cuts and she was a Labour councillor professing to be passionate about protecting the NHS. She was the obvious choice, but there was one problem; she had taken against our campaign more and more during 2018 and had even made very inaccurate attacks on our group in public Facebook groups (more on this in a future blog post). Relations had broken down.
However, we weren’t to be deterred and we discussed our best options for getting the stroke plans successfully referred back. There was a Conservative Thanet councillor who seemed to be persuadable, meaning we probably had another option if Karen declined. We figured that working with us to refer back would be in Karen’s interests as it would bring her publicity and recognition – therefore we hoped she’d put any grievances aside and agree to our request (or possibly go it alone) but either way, it worked for us and our objective.
We picked one of our committee to approach her – someone who had not been involved in earlier troubles with Cllr Constantine. We discussed making the approach as gentle and persuasive as possible, and we also decided to include Cllr Barry Lewis in the conversation, as well as another of Karen’s strong allies. We hoped they would appeal to her better nature and seal the deal.
An initial email was sent on 8th December 2018. Karen replied the following day with an unfriendly and meandering message full of (from our perspective) imagined grievances. However, she was considering meeting to discuss. So far, so good. Not ideal, perhaps, but there was still hope of collaboration that would serve the interests of each group. Barry Lewis had agreed readily – perhaps he could bring Karen on board?
The following day, 10th December, our SONIK rep offered to allow Karen, Barry and one other (not identified here) to pick a date and time that suited them to have a meeting.
Karen drops a bombshell..
But then everything changed on 12th December when Karen replied with the information that she had suddenly stepped down from the HOSC, giving her seat on the committee to fellow Labour Cllr Dara Farrell (Ashford). This was quite remarkable and confounding. Why would an elected representative give up a seat on an influential committee just at the point where the position could be incredibly useful in serving your community?
Below is that conversation between a SONIK member and Karen Constantine:
This strange occurrence has not been revealed to the wider public before, and it will be quite confusing to many, as within a few months Karen was back on the HOSC and had begun to run her own alternative NHS campaign, whose first project mirrored the SONIK effort of the same name – to ‘refer it back’. People will have seen her proclaiming loudly that we must ‘refer it back’ and encouraging residents to write to the HOSC councillors about it.
So what happened next?
Denial, Excuses and then a return to the HOSC
SONIK’s aim was to make the referral back happen, so I made calls to Dara Farrell and to some of Karen’s associates. We were concerned that she might be ill; but that turned out not to be the case. A bit later, Karen gave her reason foe exiting the HOSC at such a crucial point as being down to a keenness to work on a committee for children in care instead. In my calls to Cllr Dara Farrell, he was unwilling to commit to proposing a motion to refer back; he was not even willing to commit to voting for it. Meanwhile, members of the Labour party in Karen’s local branch of Ramsgate were baffled and angered at her decision, and she was facing some difficult and challenging questions.
I believe it was during my second phone conversation with Cllr Dara Farrell that I explained that SONIK had confirmed another councillor to make the referral back motion (Cllr Lesley Game, Conservative councillor for Cliftonville). This meant that Dara would be in a position where he would have to vote in favour or against the referral motion. I explained that SONIK intended to make it widely known after voting who voted which way. There would be no hiding for him or any of the councillors – they had to pick a side. Cllr Farrell was suddenly quite keen for Karen to be back on the HOSC in his place; and as Chair of the KCC Labour Group, he had the authority to make that change.
Shortly afterwards, Karen was returned to her position on the HOSC. She was suddenly very keen to push for a referral back, and was speaking in public about jointly putting a motion forward in conjunction with Lesley Game.
After a peculiar detour, things were back on track. Karen was now singing the same tune as us, albeit from a parallel campaign group and trying her best to claim that it had been her intention all along. But this didn’t matter as long as SONIK could keep the pressure on the committee and rely on a motion being put. SONIK produced a detailed report ‘The SONIK Stroke Report’ and we circulated it to all members of the committee; we phoned each councillor (only a few were unreachable) and we listened to their concerns and arguments, laying out our counterarguments and the evidence from various studies showing the safety risks of moving services so far away from key densely populated areas.
Karen’s insistence that the HOSC could not refer back
Another bizarre twist in this tale was Karen’s insistence on multiple occasions that the HOSC had no power to refer back and that members of SONIK were too poorly informed to understand the workings of Kent County Council. Of course this was very easy to disprove by simply pointing to the committee’s own documents that spelt out clearly where the powers of referral lay (with the HOSC and not with a similar committee, the ‘JHOSC’). These conversations took place on private Labour chat groups, meaning that Karen’s circular arguments and fits of pique when proved wrong were visible to her peers in the party. Another line of argument used by Karen when she was strongly resisting moves to refer back was the fact that the council is Tory-dominated and therefore efforts were futile. SONIK disagreed, as did the majority of active Labour party members. The difficulty was acknowledged, but her reasoning was seen as defeatist, and winning over councillors one by one, no matter what party affiliation had to be tried. We knew it had worked in Southend, and we were keen to mobilise people power to give our best shot here in Kent.
How did it all pan out?
Karen Constantine was back on the HOSC by February 2019, bearing assurances that all Labour KCC councillors now supported the attempt to refer back. What followed was further wrangling for an appropriately worded motion, attempts to resist unnecessary delays to the ‘reference back’ meeting by KCC officials and the HOSC Chair (it was delayed multiple times between March and May 2019) and winning the support of more than half of the HOSC councillors – before being foiled by rather shady tactics from the Kent NHS bosses behind the plans. When the day of the vote finally came to pass, one councillor who had given us their support mysteriously disappeared from the committee, replaced by other councillors with no prior involvement. An un-minuted private meeting between the NHS bosses behind the plans and HOSC councillors was also used to pressure 2 councillors into changing their vote. The final outcome was 6 votes in favour of referring back and 7 against. Without the switcheroo trickery and the strong-arming, we would have won the referral back and things might have been different.
Questions that haven’t gone away
The question of why Cllr Constantine dramatically exited the committee on December 18th hasn’t gone away. It was probably a major factor in her inability to win the support she needed from local Labour members to become the parliamentary candidate in 2019 (she lost to Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt).
Combined with Dara Farrell’s reticence to resist NHS stroke cuts, it leaves a question mark hanging over the KCC Labour group (made up of just 5 councillors) and their agenda when it comes to hospital service closures in the region. Whose side are they on? Why did the actions of Karen Constantine seem to be in complete opposition to the general public in her constituency, the majority of Labour party members in her area, and many Labour councillors at district level? I have more to say on this topic, but it will have to wait for a future blog post. Stay tuned.
Additional notes:
1. Readers will notice that when challenged by email, Karen Constantine responded with a series of accusations. A response to those claims can be found here.
2. This post (and all pieces on this blog) are my own views, not those of any other organisation.
In Whose Interests? 