Carol Ney, councillor for Southway ward on Plymouth City Council, resigned from Reform UK on the evening of Friday 7 August, under four months after joining the party on 17 April1. She had been deputy leader of its group on the council. Elected as Labour in 2023, sitting as an independent from 2025 and a Reform member from April, she has worn three labels in three years.
What set it off was a Facebook post about Poland's border policy by a fellow Plymouth Reform councillor, Vanessa Tyler, which read in part: "This is what Reform and Restore would do if they get in... Do you not care about our country?" Group leader Steve Ricketts declined to reprimand Tyler over it. Ney was then replaced as deputy leader by Chris Sharpe, without the group voting on the change2.
New council groups usually fracture over their first hard budget, because a conduct complaint needs a disciplinary route and a group four months old rarely has one. Plymouth ran the other sequence. The complaint came first, found no process to travel through, and left by the only exit available to it. The same group is also split over local government reorganisation and over Ricketts's own re-election prospects, so three disputes run at once inside an administration that took office in May.
This is what the aggregate looks like at close range. Behind each increment of the tracker Mark Pack has kept since May sits a named councillor, a dated Friday evening and an argument nobody outside the group witnessed. Her ward keeps its councillor; the group loses its deputy leader and gains a precedent about how the next one gets chosen.
