Opinion: When the Corrupt Protect Their Own – Hartlepool's Disturbing Echoes of National Scandals....
- teessidetoday
- May 16
- 3 min read

Just like Jimmy Savile. Just like the Post Office scandal. Once again, powerful institutions are closing ranks to protect the corrupt and silence the victims.
16th May 2025

This week, we were reminded that if you dare raise a legitimate grievance against extremist or corrupt institutions like Cleveland Police or Hartlepool Borough Council, you're very likely to find yourself branded the suspect instead.
That’s precisely what appears to have happened to two residents living in Hartlepool who raised serious concerns about alleged election fraud going back to late 2022. The allegations only came to light recently after the residents—whilst checking their credit reports for a potential house move—discovered that their details had been added to the electoral register without their knowledge or consent. The last time they'd voted was 2021.
The pair had valid reasons for wanting to stay off the public register: one is deemed to be a vulnerable adult, the other holds a sensitive role where public exposure could bring serious personal risk of harm coming to them. Despite this, someone at Hartlepool Borough Council added their names anyway. The situation is made even more disturbing when you realise the timeline.
This is because Just five days before the electoral register incident, the residents had reported unwanted and distressing contact from an officer working in Hartlepool Borough Council’s Legal Department. A man who wont take no for an answer, & who's behaviour has already led him to be investigated numerous times by the Solicitors Regulations Authority....
According to their account, the solicitor’s behaviour was described as 'aggressive', and deeply unsettling. The residents made it clear they no longer wished to be contacted by the officer, warning that legal action would follow if the harassment continued.
Then, mysteriously, their private details suddenly appeared on the council’s electoral register just five days after this incident.
According to a letter from Hartlepool Borough Council itself, it’s alleged that someone phoned HBC & pretended to be the householders (although HBC has failed to provide any call recording of this) phoning the council and register the two householders. The finger of suspicion naturally points towards the same council officer they had just confronted just five days earlier when you consider the timeline of events..
But it didn’t end there. Just Months later, the same council official was then accused of making a malicious report to Cleveland Police using the residents’ address details, leading to one of them being summoned for a police interview under caution. This escalation is chilling: a public official allegedly retaliating against civilians using state powers, and the police, like the tunnel-visioned lap dogs they are, going happily along with it.
The "Jimmy Saville of Bullies".....

One resident has since described the council officer as “the Jimmy Savile of bullies”—a powerful comparison, but one that resonates when institutions that are meant to protect us instead cover up wrongdoing and shield their own from accountability.
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Across Teesside, there is a growing sense that both Hartlepool Borough Council and Cleveland Police have become especially adept at spinning legitimate concerns raised by local members of the public back onto the complainants themselves. Victims are effectively 'gaslit', credibility undermined, and those in positions of power are vehemently protected by the very systems supposedly meant to keep them in check.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before: in the Post Office scandal, where innocent sub-postmasters were destroyed by a flawed system & then 'persecuted' by a corrupt legal system for good measure; in the Jimmy Savile case, where years of abuse was overlooked by institutions too afraid or complicit to speak out, where even the victims themselves were called out as the ones who were "causing trouble"...
Now, it’s happening right here in Hartlepool.
The corrupt are protecting the corrupt. The Justice system again falls silent. Accountability is eerily absent. And the public—people like you and me—are left exposed to their Extremism...
When your local council and your local police no longer act as the protectors, but as the predators, it’s not just a failure of leadership.
It’s a collapse of democracy itself.
So Let’s call it out what it is.......
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