- In an email dated 9 December 2019, Karen Constantine stated that SONIK did not support the local Labour party having their own campaign to resist the stroke unit closure at QEQM, or that SONIK told the South Thanet Labour Party that it should not run its own campaign. This is not true. It may be the case that one or two LP members suggested throwing weight behind SONIK rather than running a parallel campaign, but this did not come from SONIK. Speaking on my own behalf, I stated clearly that it would make sense for the Labour Party to run a campaign parallel to the SONIK one. The rumour that SONIK was trying to ‘block’ Labour from running their own campaign did the rounds locally, but thankfully most people didn’t believe it.
- It is true that SONIK did not and could not support the ‘Thanet Stroke Campaign’ group’s aims, because they differed significantly from SONIK’s standpoint in one area: SONIK’s aim was to preserve and improve current services without leaving certain areas behind; TSC’s was to save Thanet’s stroke unit only, even if that meant Ashford losing theirs. TSC would not challenge the halving of Kent’s stroke units, only the chosen locations. TSC was described variously as a ‘cross-party group’ and a Labour campaign. The input from the wider Labour membership was minimal; it appeared to be run by Karen Constantine and Jenny Matterface without consulting other members.
- In the same email dated 9 December 2018, Karen Constantine insinuated ‘naivety’ on the part of SONIK in trying to organise a referral back of the stroke plans. She claimed that “the key forum [the HOSC] excludes Labour, as County Councillors we are too few in number to qualify for a seat”. The members of the HOSC (Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee) are listed publicly on the Kent County Council website. At the time of the email being written, Karen Constantine herself sat on that committee as a Labour councillor. It was well known that she sat on that committee and she referred to her role frequently when speaking in public. I do not know why she claimed that Labour had no seat on the committee when it was public knowledge that Labour was allocated one seat on the HOSC, and that seat was hers. In an email dated 12th December 2018, Constantine stated “please bear in mind Labour don’t have a right to a seat on the JHOSC. No seat, no vote”. The JHOSC (Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee) is a separate committee that did not have the final vote on the matter of referral back. Constantine was not being asked to take any action on that committee, as we knew she did not have a seat there.
- Another claim made by Constantine and some of her friends was that SONIK were not willing to pursue a Judicial Review regarding the cuts to stroke unit provision in Kent. A variation on this claim was that SONIK had left it too late to begin proceedings. Both of these were proved wrong, as we did go to court over the matter in December 2019. It was very frustrating to deal with these peculiar accusations, because we had discussed our intention to seek a judicial review very openly in public since 2017; it was on SONIK’s social media, it had been in the press, and we discussed it at our public meetings and on our street stalls with members of the public. At a time when we needed to be as focussed as possible to ensure our legal case was strong and packed with all the evidence we had gathered, we found ourselves having to troubleshoot a social media attack in which our group was being misrepresented on multiple forums.
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Addendum to “When Karen Constantine stepped down from the Kent Health Scrutiny Committee”
In Whose Interests? 