It's a bit rich threatening Council workers with the law?

The current actions on social media from a REFORM UK Ltd., Councillor from the town of Blyth, Northumberland are in question from many Council Workers across the county. 

It appears via the site ‘What do they know’ that the Councillor in question owes thousands of pounds in Council tax. 

Payment of such tax is a legal requirement in the UK which ultimately pays this Councillor the huge allowances he receives each and every month for representing the public who voted him into office.

The public he represents, in this Councillors case have also been vocal on the issue of his threatening behaviour towards the managers and workers who keep their streets clean, grass cut and refuse collected being threatened with being maligned through unproven law breaking by a law breaker.

The Councillor in question, Barry Elliott who represents Newsham Ward is seeking “transparency and accountability from ALL in public office, no matter who you are”.

All except himself, Barry Elliott of course!

Northumberland no longer needs REFORMing? The Tories are up and running with ‘Austerity Always

 With Nigel Farage thinking he has seen the light by accepting Liz Truss into his ‘no salad’ party and his almost incoherent rant this week harnessing Trump’s ‘Austerity First’ into REFORM UK policy, his Councillors in Northumberland have already been beaten to the line by ultra right farmer Glen Sanderson’s secret cabinet Tories and their ‘Austerity Always’ policy which includes a Doge like workforce scatter program to lower its wage and pensions obligations.

Farage’s activity pushed by him and backed up by his public school educated leadership group mates are trying to emulate Trump’s austerity attack on society in America who are suffering the net effects of his massive world-wide slump caused by his on the hoof tariffs that almost led to 42M Americans being starved to death as his austerity program was to be kickstarted by halting food credits.

The Trump administration threatened to suspend all SNAP food benefits, affecting nearly 42 million Americans. This led a coalition of over two dozen states to file a lawsuit to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to release emergency reserve funds. The administration eventually agreed to use contingency funds to pay partial benefits, though the full extent of the payments remains in question amidst conflicting statements from Trump and the White House.

In the UK Trump's tariffs have hit hard and ever more people are having to rely on regular handouts from food banks, with this year's figures moving towards 5 % of the population, Tory darling Glen Sanderson’s secret cabinet plans for wage reduction won’t help the County's commerce, retail trade or hospitality sector at all (we’ll come back to that shortly) first we must put to bed the REFORM racist argument of its ‘all the immigrants fault’.

The truth is Food bank users in the UK are overwhelmingly UK-born individuals. While the exact number of British citizens among the total users is not specified in recent reports, a recent study noted that this group forms the vast majority of the 2.9M service users last year, the trussel trust estimate In Northumberland is that 16240 households. There are three foodbanks who publish data regularly use food banks with fair shares aid helping almost as many older people who live on benefits and pensions but don’t qualify for food aid, making an estimated 10% of households in Northumberland use food aid in one form or another.

Nationally this much needed help has forced up retail prices beyond the norm and is fuelling food inflation that will be stretched further by Northumberland Conservatives doge plans to change its workforce into a very low paid entity.

Glen Sanderson’s cabinet has begun a program to rid itself of workers on the top increments of their wage scales without making those posts redundant. Workers will be pushed out of the door on a confidentiality agreement which pays them a lump sum and be replaced with workers on the bottom of his stretched incremental change program with many jobs now covering two or three pay scales before workers reach the top of the grade. Lowering the County pay bill for possibly a decade and beyond.

This plan will demoralise the sectors reliant on the income from Council workers who make up the largest income sector in job numbers terms across the county and force up shop prices even further as its becoming evident that shrinkflation and  high prices are becoming the norm in many of Northumberland’s towns hit by 14 years of Conservative delivered austerity and Brexit failures followed by Trump's international attack on goods and services through his REFORM UK backed tariff scheme and Northumberland Conservatives ‘Austerity Always’ series of policy secrets. 

So who needs REFORM?

Will REFORM UK Northumberland send another disgraceful nasty councillor to room 101 with the independents? or will he be ostracized for being ultra nasty to disabled people by his constituents

With the Leadership of REFORM UK Ltd., making public how they will be slashing benefits if they gain control of the country particularly those paid to disabled people their Councillor members have been showing how badly they will treat disabled people now and in the future.

It's reported that Reform UK Northumberland Councillor for Choppington with Hepscott, which is home to many older people with disabilities drove his motorhome on the wrong side of the road to queue jump 3 drivers waiting to park in the disabled spaces at Morpeth NHS Centre. He then allegedly edged forward to block off the other spaces and cut off access for a patient with cerebral palsy who had waited 20 minutes in his wheelchair.

His exploits appear to many commentators on social media as bullying and excessive even for a supporter of a Party who are against PIP and other benefits and are openly praising invented obstacles to cut the needy off from benefits following Trump's line in the USA.

He is recorded as being a member of SACRE a committee dealing with religious education on the Council with his actions at Morpeth NHS Centre showing he has dismissed Proverbs 28:27 “Turn not away thine eye from the needy” as he placed his need before others and should be sacked from his role in SACRE for his recent actions.

His party may turn the other cheek and decide he was following the national policy of REFORM UK Ltd., but others who recently challenged their very silent Council Group leader have been expelled for less. It's time his constituents opened their mouths to decry their elected public servants' actions.

Why have South-East Northumberland voters decided to endanger 9,500 green jobs and pressurise 12,000 NHS Posts?

South-east Northumberland is recognised as one of the most troubled employment blackspots in the UK. 

It's an area still recovering from the savage cuts imposed by Capitalist leaning Tory Governments and the stripping out of wider help brought in by the Blair and Brown administrations via the multi prime ministered Tories austerity clubs determined to make more and more millionaires to entrap the poor whilst ruling England over 14 of the last 15 years.

Blair and Brown's legacy of help for young people to stay in education, sure start schemes to assist the adventure of early learning for the young, the development of ever more social homes along with dozens of other initiatives were immediately crushed into the dust by the Tory-LibDem alliance. It’s that alliance who delivered the hugely damaging to South-east Northumberland ‘bedroom tax’ as one example of how Capitalist interference in Government pushed more Council tenants to purchase their homes leading them to be scooped up by absentee landlords by the bucketload a few years on, raising rents through the roof and destabilising one of the few constants South-east Northumberland could rely on.

The Tories pushed on and promised all, delivering little and at local government level planned to wipe out any remnants of improvements from Labour as they could, with the 31 months and still ongoing of damaging road closures in the County’s largest market town, Blyth, as a prime example of the Tories raging desire to wipe out any legacy Labour may have left in that now wrecked shopping experience that remains of Blyth’s Town Centre, blaming Labour for the downturn.

Their plot succeeded to a point with the area voting in a Tory MP ending decades of Labour support in the town at both local and national level.

But with the Tories crumbling nationally and a party ‘REFORM UK Ltd., with very little policy using high level media coverage to grow politically, now proven to be backed by Russian cash and oil magnates money using working people as pawns in a game to harness cheaper almost free workers via removal of the nation from the ECHR and forget that global warming is a problem to the whole of mankind whilst engineering debate designed only to assist big companies, grabbing a hold of local Council’s has led to a massive loss of job security for thousands of workers across South-east Northumberland.

Nigel Farage and his REFORM party is leading thousands of people towards a lemming like self destruction through the media - “all of it is awash with Reform (and similar) on a daily basis - it's so relentless that it's putting people off any form of media. That and the wholesale attacks on the current Government. Even the BBC is blasting out Reform propaganda on a daily basis” and that opinion has been given by those with better understanding than us in the codgers group. See link below.

Yet in South-east Northumberland an area completely reliant on the NHS and green work for jobs, and benefits for others, voting is slipping towards people losing those jobs or at least the rate of pay being reduced for those jobs and REFORM insisting that pensions are benefits each and every day the prospects for South-east Northumberland in future years look very bleak indeed.

REFORMS CUTS EXPLAINED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuJ05z4xBI

Ian Duncan-Smith damaging welfare reforms explained:
https://www.citizensinformationboard.ie/downloads/relate/relate_2012_06.pdf

Will the ‘new mixture’ gift the local taxdodger the chance to run once again for Parliament?

 

The news that REFORM UK Ltd., has been found out in Northumberland has not come as a shock to most north-east based observers.

The reform group in the county was made up of ex-UKIP, BNP and oddball fascist chancers spreading racist fear through the mechanisms of Northumberland County Councils freedom of information scheme.

Infighting at a level not seen since Danelaw migrants ruled across Northumbria has dragged them down into life's maelstrom with bitter fireballs hurled verbally in public as internal control among the fascists who make up the bulk of the reform team completely collapses around their ears.

The battle scarred members of that team who have mostly sat silent and failed to tackle or even challenge the leading group of Tories on the County Council appear to have split through problems coming to light about their beliefs and lack of populist common sense, with the left being able to point quite clearly towards their former BREXIT lies and failures which kept ordinary people in their place through a low wage culture based on lies and inflationary need making millionaires into billionaires a culture openly preached by the owners of REFORM UK Ltd., every day whilst in a similar vein of culture sharing is harped back to by the Tories whose backers have sewn up their pockets and they urgently need to extend their membership numbers to be able to sponsor any future elections.

That's why the last fourteen years of austerity makes it clear that Tory policy in that regard didn’t reward hard work and people now try all ways to stay on benefits as it's more lucrative than lower grade employment as benefits offset inflation while wages haven’t kept pace at all.

The other right-wing chancers making up Northumberland County Council the conservatives, who are fully to blame for the state of the nation as well as the County as they rush to forget their faux pas years, see this as an opportunity to ditch the ever greedy and wanton independent group who they are having to nurture with promises of huge cash burning localised ward projects and see this breakdown of their fellows (and we codgers don’t use the term fellows lightly as both parties sit welded to the anti-female don’t take paracetamol when your pregnant blame culture), as an opportunity to add to their ranks people who unfortunately see the world through the same shattered panes as themselves.

The Conservatives have openly advertised their wish to embrace Reforms County and Parish Council teams and suck the flag flying commando rioting culture into their ranks to cast further pain on a public they seem to think deserves it.

One who may ‘and this is conjecture’ see this as a valuable chance is a Reform Town and County Councillor for Blyth, Barry Elliott who openly wears the technicolour dreamcoat as he has tried all parties to aid his way into Parliament but pushing out the failed Ian Levy could get him there but he has to cross another floor to gain that traction.

This story will no doubt run and run so we codgers will have to label it

EPISODE 1.

What are Northumberland Conservatives going to do with the Council’s constitution breakers?

 

With the Conservatives nationally stampeding towards a takeover of REFORM UK Ltd., Northumberland Conservatives seem to be ignoring reform opposition members faux pas, probably just in case they are vying with each other for County Council seats in the ‘New Transformer’ Party UK Co. LTD’. 

It's expected that the now disgraced tax dodger Mr Farage will be forced by public opinion strengthened by ACTIVE UK members on social media to resign with full on Tory toff Jacob Reece Mogg lined up to take his place.

But just in case we codgers have read the runes incorrectly we need to ask what if anything is the Leader of Northumberland County Council, labeled dysfunctional, going to do to ensure Councillors on this massive authority follow the rules of constitution and in some cases the laws of the land.

We have a Town littered with flags which are being used to signal the rise of the right, a Town where right wing activists have displayed racist comments at the Towns  monument to the fallen, a monument naming those who fought and died protecting the world from the extreme right wing views of the Nazis, now being glorified by Citizens who have ‘decided to forget’. Councillors on this Council are littered with those who have broken the Nolan principles and possibly the equality laws of the UK.

Let's begin by looking at the Nolan principles: which contains the need for Leaders of Councils to uphold those principles has this Leader decided to ignore them? 

A local Bedlington councillor has written to the press (article in the editorial notes) the Leader of Council has responded in the weakest way possible, drifting from the Nolan principles as far as he possibly can. With Universities supporting the view that flags put up for the enhancement of the ultra right of politics is frightening off the Bedlington Councillor’s residents.

The Leader of Council whose rose tinted glasses must have missed the huge higher education development rising from the ground right beside Ashington Town Centre whose students may feel the same way as their peers.

We next want to know what the Leadership group of the Council is going to do about Councillor Fitzgerald, an elected member who seems to be going to the extreme and is possibly an anti-multiculturalist in his personal beliefs when he demanded at a full council meeting that only Christian values should be taught in schools. Putting this mess on the back burner raises several issues and the Council’s leader needs to act quickly and not in his usual dysfunctional fashion.

The next collapse of the Council's very weak constitution has raised its head placing even more pressure on the Council’s Leader.

A Councillors who it was reported can not take part in any discussion on the Council’s budget as he owes the Council money. 

It's come to light through a freedom of information request that Councillor Barry Elliott representing Newsham in Blyth owes the Council more than £10,000 in unpaid Council Tax. Yet the Council’s leadership has allowed him to raise issues about finance and sit on the Council’s audit committee, a complete breach of the Nolan principles. 

Councillor Elliott has expressed the view that the Council needs to spend its revenue cash reserves. It appears that the Councillor who wants to be heavily involved in the Council’s finance does not understand how those finances need to be protected and what they can be legally used for while ignoring his responsibilities towards the public purse by allowing his debts to accumulate yearly denying the Council the opportunity to spend Councillor Elliott's cash to benefit the Counties communities.

Will anything be done by the Council’s Leadership group to resolve some of these issues or have the caretakers at county hall in Morpeth removed the tacks holding down the carpet yet again so that matters can be swept under?

Notes:

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/warning-that-flying-of-flags-is-causing-divide-among-residents-of-northumberland-town-5318054

https://inews.co.uk/news/flag-wars-scaring-overseas-students-unis-cash-crisis-3915643?srsltid=AfmBOor_UJiRmQX4TEMxudZhe3qD5RFVD1rghjTIj1Diyh2G3ecuFYfz

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/25464542.reform-uk-councillor-calls-religious-education-changes/

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-councillor-claims-studying-non-christian-religion-could-brainwash-children/ar-AA1MtrJy

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/08/report-describes-fear-and-intimidation-at-northumberland-county-councill

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-reform-councillor-calls-council-32258991

Slashing the regeneration of Ashington budget while borrowing to build an academy school the Council has no involvement in is a dysfunction too far

 

From 2015-2017 Northumberland Conservatives ran a campaign against any spend in Ashington, a town with the second highest level of deprivation in this huge county.

But looking at other poorer areas, they have backed away from Capital projects to improve those areas as much as they can, the need for a new swimming pool in Prudhoe is a prime example of their hatred of those living in areas of deprivation.

The Conservatives have raised council tax at the highest rate allowed plus sticking folk with the huge extra of the social services precept each and every year since 2018 yet still mismanaged a huge overspend of £7.5m in the social services/children’s services area this year.

This overspend is so large it couldn’t be massaged into hiding by the secret cabinet as they weren’t strong enough to flatten the lump down under their pantomime magic carpet which adorns the leaders office.

On Wednesday 10 October 2025 the council is expected to accept slashing the Ashington regeneration budget to support the capital borrowing of cash to finish the environmental works, stations etc on the Northumberland rail line project. Costs were forced up through the lack of fixed price contracting and the Council not finishing the GRIP studies for the line and agreeing acceptance of a GRIP and a half that has led to this dysfunctional mess stealing the headlines.

That’s not all that will affect the Councils poorer areas as in the last two weeks the Council Leader has agreed to borrow to build a new high school in Berwick. It’s an academy school which is meant to be developed by a sponsor. It seems the education sponsors have hidden from this new build as the redundancy/pension costs to shed 60 teaching staff in order to open the new school runs into £ millions and it’s expected the Council will have to ruin service delivery across the Ashington and Blyth area to cover the stretch in their revenue budget this mess will cost.

All in all the issues found in the Max Caller report and the BEST report are coming home to roost and it’s noticeable the Councils finance guru Councillor Nick Oliver appears to have gone into hiding under a stone ever since he was promised the cash to build a cycleway near his home just in case anyone noticed.

Northumberland: God help all who sail in her!