Reform councillor banned from parish meetings over social media posts

A parish council has asked a Reform UK councillor to stay away from their meetings after he came under fire for his choice of words in social media posts.

Peter Mason, councillor for Burton South at Staffordshire County Council, apologised after the posts, dating from 2023 and 2024, recently surfaced. He was elected to the council in May 2025.

The cabinet member for strategic highways has since deleted his X account and said he was affected by grief and redundancy at the time he made the posts.

Horninglow and Eton Parish Council passed a motion to say Mason was no longer welcome at future parish meetings. Reform UK said Mason’s case had been reviewed and there was no action to be taken.

Four complaints were made to the county council regarding the posts. The authority’s standards and code of conduct group said since they were written before he took office no action would be taken.

In one post Mason referenced referred to black women in derogatory terms when discussing a statue.

In another post, from April 2024, he criticised police calling them “politically indoctrinated British hating scum.”

Parish council chairman Paul Walker said the motion showed the council stood firmly against racism, misogyny and homophobia and that Horninglow and Eton was a diverse area.

When questioned whether he thought Mason should resign, Walker suggested he should “search his soul, and think with those views that he quite clearly has, whether he is capable and has the confidence of the people that he was elected to serve, which is a diverse community.”

The county council’s Conservative group leader Philip White described the comments as “abhorrent” and said he found it worrying Reform believed the fact that councillor Mason made these comments prior to being elected exonerated him.

Reform UK Staffordshire County Council leader Ian Cooper said this case was reviewed by the Standards Committee and assessed against the Code of Conduct, resulting in their conclusions (that no action is to be taken).

Cooper adds: “Peter issued an apology and has since focused on fulfilling his responsibilities.”

“It is clear that recent attempts to revisit this issue are a distraction from the Conservatives’ own challenges following poor polling and a series of defections to Reform UK. This approach amounts to cancel culture.”

The BBC tried to contact Mason for a response.

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