– Karen Constantine was imposed as the Labour KCC candidate against the will of the rank-and-file members who know her

– No vote was held to elect Constantine; in fact the vote was prevented by party officials

– Ramsgate’s Mayor and a local NHS cuts campaigner were prevented from standing despite local support

– The party’s rules that require selection via a democratic vote were ignored to ensure Constantine was selected

Have you ever asked yourself why local councillors seem to be ineffective, or fail to represent their constituents? Have you ever wondered why councillors seem to be hypcritical or dishonest, and thought ‘why did the party choose that person to represent them? Didn’t they know? Didn’t they vet them?’ We’ve all seen examples of councillors guilty of wrongdoing across the country. The question is why and how people who are unfit get into public office, and I hope to at least partially address that question here.

The Labour party state that they are for the working people, and that they uphold the values of democracy and integrity. In this article about Ramsgate candidate Karen Constantine, I will show how party officials that work behind the scenes intervene in democratic decision-making, go against party rules and seek to install council candidates without a vote taking place.

During 2020, the Labour party began its process of selecting candidates for the local elections now taking place (May 6th 2021 is polling day). These are the steps to becoming a candidate for the Labour Party:

1) Party members who wish to stand for election make an application to their local campaign forum.

2) The party’s staff carry out checks to ensure the candidate is appropriate to represent the party.

3) The local members receive a written document with a pitch from each selection candidate prior to a selection meeting.

4) Local members attend the selection meeting where they can ask each potential candidate questions and then a democratic vote is held.

Candidate selection should be the choice of the local members by democratic vote. Even where only one potential candidate has come forward, a vote must still be held, and if the members reject that person, the process must begin again.

The reason for all of this is to ensure the right people are chosen. It is a system of checks and balances to avoid people with criminal intentions getting through, but also to filter out problems relating to bad character, dishonest behaviour and general fitness for public office. If a person can’t win over the support of the local members that they engage with on a regular basis, then how can they win over the public? It’s a system that should work well. If a bad apple is trying to gain power, this system should catch that person and prevent their selection. Who better to entrust with this role than the group responsibility of local members who will usually know the potential candidates personally and will have seen them in action. It is also democracy in action, something that is supposed to be embedded in Labour’s value system.

So how does it go wrong?
The answer is that party executives who are unelected and work in the background are the ones that actually control these selections in many cases. They abuse step 2 (mentioned above) to block alternative candidates getting through in order that they can put their personal choice forward. It is highly undemocratic, and it is an open secret in the Labour party. If abusing step 2 doesn’t work, they will suspend potential candidates on spurious grounds, thus disqualifying them from the race.

The Labour party is divided into roughly two groups – those that abhor this practice, and those that allow it to continue because it suits their career or their factional preference. The rank-and-file members mostly hate the manipiulation of democracy and are continually battling it from within. The party hierarchy (including the staff, executives and many MPs) are largely in favour of it, and do all they can to cover it up.

In order to impose Karen Constantine as the Labour KCC candidate for Ramsgate, two potential candidates were knocked out of the running by an undemocratically appointed panel.

The applicants who were rejected were myself (a campaigner committed to halting local NHS cuts) and Raushan Ara, who is the current Mayor of Ramsgate (and councillor on the district and town council). Both of us were deemed to be unfit to go forward, which meant that local members were not given the chance to vote for either of us. It is highly suspect that Mayor Raushan Ara was not seen as fit to stand for office given that she already holds public office as a Labour representative; also, she was approved by party panels to stand as the parliamentary candidate TWICE before (in 2017 and 2019). She is well liked in the party and in the town of Ramsgate. The rank-and-file party members in Ramsgate were angered and confused by this decision, and they objected vehemently to it.

Raushan Ara decided not to appeal the decision, but I did make an appeal. I wrote a detailed document in my defence, and I added many testimonials from various people in the community as well as national-level NHS camapigners, such as the Chair of Keep Our NHS Public. My campaigning work and collaboration with groups that resist NHS privatisation and cuts meant that I could call on many people to argue why I would be a good candidate. I had also worked very hard within the party as constituency secretary (an elected role) and as a manager on the 2019 election campaign. I made a thorough case and hoped that it would be seen by officials outside the narrow panel of four who had declined to approve me initially.

 
To my surprise, while I was awaiting an appeal hearing, I recieved a notice of suspension from the party. This meant that my appeal would not be heard, and that I was ineligible to stand for any office within the party until my suspension was investigated and dealt with. A suspension means that you might be eventually expelled from the party, but each case is investigated before that happens. When you are suspended, you are in a kind of limbo; you have not been found guilty, but you cannot attend meetings and if you are a potential candidate, and you are automatically disqualified until you are cleared. This is why suspension is such an effective weapon weilded by party bureaucrats to secure their own preferred candidates get in. A rival candidate can be easily knocked out of the race, and if the reasons for suspension are too flimsy for an expulsion, they can just reinstate the person once the selection process has finished. Very convenient.

The reason for my suspension rested solely on email conversations between myself and a party official who worked at the regional office. The emails show me making requests to the party staffer that relate to party business, in line with my previous role as secretary. In the emails, I chase up actions that have not been completed. On a few occasions I ask how we can try to speed things up, and I also complain about memos sent to party members during election time that undermined our local campaign. That was the full extent of the complaint against me. After nineteen days I was reinstated to the party, and the suspension lifted. Nineteen days was long enough to ensure that my appeal could not be heard and that I could not be one of the potential candidates to be voted on by local members.

How did the rank-and-file of the Ramsgate Labour party react to Karen’s undemocratic appointment? They were furious.

They were notified by email that Karen Constantine had been selected as one of the Ramsgate candidates without a vote taking place. They were told that no other candidates had been ‘longlisted’ and therefore she was ‘duly elected’. The members could see that it was a stitch-up, and they took various steps to try and resist the decision. They signed a letter of objection and sent it to the Chairperson of the branch. They objected at length at their next branch meeting and at the selection meeting. The Chair and Vice Chair of the branch plus the Women’s Officer (all elected roles) along with the members tried to ensure that a vote was held regardless, as per the party rulebook, but they were overruled.

Bureaucrats at regional level and on the Campaign Forum refused to allow a vote despite it being the normal practice. The party’s governance team (GLU) backed them up using an obscure and peculiar interpretation of the rules that shocked and frustrated the local party members. The vast majority at a local level did not want Karen Constantine imposed in this way. They pointed out that it was undemocratic. They objected to myself and Raushan Ara being blocked. They pushed back for as long as they could, but ultimately the few connected and influential officials triumphed over the numbers on the ground locally, and nothing could be done. One of those who wholeheartedly objected to Ramsgate members being robbed of their vote was Mark Hopkinson, who won the other Ramsgate candidate position himself – by a democratic vote.

Why didn’t the bureaucratic element just allow the vote to go ahead and see if Karen Constantine would win, you may wonder. The answer is that Constantine had become very unpopular with local members due to percieved (alleged) sabotage of a rival for the parliamentary candidacy; her bizarre actions relating to fighting local NHS cuts; and many other reasons (of which there are too many to list). An internal Ramsgate branch vote during 2019 to select delegates to a constituency committee saw Karen Constantine come out last on a list of about 25 members. Her reputation and standing within the party locally was not good. She was not trusted. She had also lashed out publicly against fellow Labour party candidates on social media during the 2019 local elections, something which is not only very damaging to the party’s election prospects but also normally results in suspension and expulsion. Not in Karen’s case though.

The likelihood of Karen Constantine succeeding in a members’ vote was very, very small indeed. 

In conclusion, political parties can’t be infallible, but they can have checks and balances in place, and they can trust in the democratic group decisions of their own members. As a safeguard, it is an approach that could and should work the majority of the time. But if unelected executives in key roles behind the scenes choose to bend and twist the rules to evade democratic decision-making, the checks and balances are useless. It only works if the people enforcing the rules are guided by the democratic principle and follow it.

For too long, this hasn’t been the case. Examples of stitch-ups abound within Labour. While the stitch-ups continue, the party is going to be dragged down by representatives who let the side down. While the stitch-ups continue, the party will be shaped by unelected and faceless bureaucrats who believe their judgement is better and should therefore override the will of the local people who actually know the candidates.

For full disclosure, this blog is authored by Carly Jeffrey who is an interested party in this story (this should be evident from reading the piece). A paper trail of emails and other documents backs this story up in full. Please contact the author for access to the documents.