Tories Tagged Reform as ‘Nazi’s’ BBC shows Farage links with Epstein. Reform Councils in deep doodah As their DOGE program finds Jack.

 

Taking all of the above in context, what's happening across Northumberland now that panto season is upon us?

To look back over the last few months and answer the questions above the National Media system has we need to look at the run in to May 2025 local government elections.

Reform Northumberland in the name of Natalie Rolls began by posting a right leaning FOI on ‘what do they know’ pointing the finger at the Council’s involvement with the migrant dispersal scheme (link below) beginning the stirring of the South Beach spurtle spreading fear among locals.

Within a few short months of becoming the Council’s official opposition infighting among the Reform Group began to kick off publicly with low turnouts at meetings and Reform’s leader sitting silent at filmed Full Council meetings. —---  Revolt ensued.

The "revolt" in Northumberland refers to a recent period of internal chaos within the Reform UK party's local group, which led to the expulsion of three councillors in October 2025. 

Two councillors, Nicole Brooke and Patrick Lambert, were expelled for allegedly breaching party rules by attempting to organize a no-confidence vote in the local group's leadership. Both councillors denied any wrongdoing and have since joined Northumberland County Council's Independent Group.

A third councillor, John Allen, was expelled after an investigation into online comments he allegedly made, which included statements about wanting to harm Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The anti-racism group Hope Not Hate brought these comments to light. 

The expulsions reduced the total number of Reform UK councillors on Northumberland County Council from 23 to 20, though they remain the official opposition to the Conservative administration. The events have drawn national media attention and scrutiny regarding the party's internal governance and vetting processes. 

Councillor Allen whose investigation appears to still be underway and may have to join his Council meeting from incarceration, resigned from his Ashington Town Council seat but retained his well paid seat on Northumberland County Council and sits as a sometimes attending ‘Independent’ Councillor.

Next was ‘whose balls are the biggest’ with social media illustrating the ‘he did it first’ spats between a Tory and a REFORM Councillor who both appeared to block off disabled parking bays in their respective Health Centre car parks with their unbelievably expensive boy toy motorhomes. Whichever Councillor was first doesn’t really matter to us codgers but it really does illustrate the type of person making decisions on this described by professionals as a fully dysfunctional council.

The infighting continued between REFORM members with close scrutiny by other fairness campaigners than Hope Not Hate, with ‘show racism the red card’ and REFORM Watch Northumberland keeping up the public pressure on social media. With a follower of these sites openly expressing the opinion that seems to be growing that REFORM SUPPORTERS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN AT FOOTBALL GAMES AS PROFESSIONAL SPORTSPERSONS TAKE THE KNEE AGAINST THEIR RACIST COMMENTS AND ACTIVITIES.

The BBC then came in with a news story that may bring work for the builder politician Barry Elliott? As on BBC North-East news he was shown threatening to make a citizen's arrest of a reporter.

He mustn't watch or read much about prisons or have noticed that they are full to the gunnels, or is it that he wants to develop a site he may own to lock up citizens whom he doesn’t like?

But the BBC didn't only show this aggressive side of Councillor Elliott they told the Story of him not paying back his debts to aged customers he had scammed and the courts instructed him to pay back and like most things he hasn’t bothered to comply with the courts demands.

With the pressure on, the Tory led Council he represents took him to court to resolve his personal debts to them and society in general, that of non-payment of Council Tax and Business Rates. Its a story that's still running with the press with Elliott delivering his Geordies Overboard style once again.

There's currently a by-election following the resignation of a conservative councillor from Blyth Town Council, Labour are fielding a candidate Helen Lockyer who was brought up and lives centrally in the Ward. Reform are fielding a Tory who was so active in the Conservative Party he signed the nomination papers for Ian Levy the Blyth Valley Constituency Tory MP. It's strange how the world turns but the National Tory Chairman has labeled REFORM as Nazi’s so the choice is up to the people living in that ward, a ‘girl of the people’ who loves her community or an ex austerity party top supporter converted to fascism?

It’s been rumoured that the Tories on the county council are trying to pull a flanker by situating the polling station OUTSIDE THE WARD BOUNDARIES in some sort of hope their Councillor who lives in a different part of Blyth may pick up the outgoing councillors postal votes and keep a foothold for doginess going forward. We hope local people see through this veil of deceit?

We codgers wonder where the REFORM group on Northumberland County Council will go next as we hear they haven’t enrolled in the Bedlington panto group training led by a top local entertainer whose own fantastic panto is on a Consett Theatre this winter, but wherever it is it should be sitting on institutions that have been filled with fairness and positive understanding of Blyth communities needs and wants that are being twisted and not reformed by those with the loudest most aggressive voices.

NOTES:

https://www.gbnews.com/politics/nigel-farage-kevin-hollinrake-reform-uk-tories-nazi-party

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgy81jlxqgo

https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/councillors-reforum-uk-nigel-farage-b2765359.html

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/10/06/reform-is-failing/

https://leftfootforward.org/2025/06/reform-brutally-mocked-after-unleashing-new-doge-team-on-first-council/

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/freedom_of_information_request_i_308

https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/politics/chaos-engulfs-reform-uk-in-northumberland/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2prgw8nzeo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yj927wje5o

https://hopenothate.org.uk/2025/09/19/starmer-john-allen-reform-uk/

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-county-councillor-launches-attack-32655993

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/25652262.northumberland-councillor-ordered-pay-near-40-000-debt-council/

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1227841512736227

https://youtu.be/H1H49LOiLOU?si=zTnP2ilvIAzN-e8M

Tory Farmer wants to spend £21m of your cash on complying with Boris’s silent Environment Act 2021

 During the disastrous reign of Boris Johnson running the nation and that's all we want to say about him, a new act of parliament was introduced,the Environment Act 2021.

The ‘act’ unlike most legislation was brought on line in an almost empty format with changes by Councils to be included if they fitted in with the then secretary of state's beauty pageant.

Councils who wanted to lead the pack rushed headlong into changes surrounding part 3 of the act issuing stacks of different refuse containers and stretching the time waste is left lying around at people's homes  sometimes standing four weeks between collection dates.

Farmer and Tory County Councillor John Riddle has proposed a change to try to encourage people to  recycle more, extending collection times into his expensive ‘have another bin service change’ and widening Northumberland's borrowing ‘Black-Hole’ by a massive £21m.

Under the 2021 empty environment act publicity was run out to warn the public they may have to house up to seven containers and food prices would be forced up to cover the supermarkets constant use of single-shot plastic boxes and bags along with huge environmental levies for getting rid of their huge piles of waste. That additional charge to supermarkets has grown out of all proportion with shrinkflation of  goods commonplace and it's Hobson's choice for most families to pay more and get less in supermarkets today.

With the Government so busy trying to save the NHS and strengthen our borders the number of containers has been moved to a maximum of four with that decision yet to be scrutinised in rural areas like Northumberland by MP’s.

Councillor Riddle is proposing four or is it five if you pay the ransom to have a brown bin for your garden waste.

Social media is red hot with people who have little chance of housing four or five bins and dozens of valid suggestions on what the county council should be spending £21m on.

But the real question asked by those who understand the vagaries of local government single status pay agreements, is how much will this seemingly unsolicited rise in self sorting of family waste force up council tax to cover the hike in workers wages bringing in this new scheme in?

Birmingham is in the midst of a bin strike that seems to have no end linked to an increase in responsibilities through their chosen recycling system. Those increased responsibilities must be paid for through the single status agreement.

It wasn't the fault of those on strike now working for a bankrupt city council that Birmingham hadn't honoured the same agreement for another set of their workers who won their case in the high court busting the Council through the result.

Council Tax in Northumberland is already one of the highest in the UK but which resident wants to pay more because a farmer wants to increase your debt and fill your garden with plastic monoliths.

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.