Britain is broken, we need an election.

I am calling for a General Election at the soonest possible date.

The Prime Minister is finished. I have to give Starmer some credit: even I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would reveal himself as the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has ever had the misfortune of having.

Starmer isn’t the first Prime Minister I’ve deposed, and he won’t be the last. David Cameron. Theresa May. Rishi Sunak. And next up - Andy Burnham. The reason each leader has failed is the same. What the political class fails to understand is that the electorate won’t accept being taken for fools. They cannot continue to take the votes of the people who supported them for granted, only to betray them upon having gained power. Politics is about trust.

That is why I am calling for a General Election at the soonest possible date. You know as well as I do that the country cannot afford to waste another week drifting from crisis to crisis. That’s why millions of you turned out in the local elections to vote for Reform councillors, and it’s why we have led in more than 300 opinion polls for well over a year.

The British public have made their voices clear in May this year and last: Britain is broken and they want a radical reforming government that will fundamentally fix our country. But instead, Westminster wants to crown Andy Burnham off the back of a single by-election.

I’ve been frank that I was disappointed by the result in Makerfield. But I must also remind people of something important. On the ballot paper in that by-election, there was no discussion about “Manchesterism”, no pretence that Burnham had any actual solutions to the problems plaguing the country. He simply repackaged Reform’s winning strategy from the May elections to great effect to Get Starmer Out. When he knocked on doors, he didn’t try and convince people that he was the right man to represent their constituency, just that he was not Keir Starmer. He sold people a compelling message - of Starmer being thrown out of Downing Street.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to pretend that Andy Burnham has any kind of meaningful mandate to lead the country. We are about to have our sixth Prime Minister in seven years; this is farcical, reminiscent of post-war Italy. Is that the sort of politics Labour voters wanted to see repeated when they took a chance on a different party in 2024? No. They wanted to see the Tories thrown out of power, in the same way Makerfield voters only wanted to see the back of Keir Starmer. Removing a failing leader, only to replace him with another one - without a public vote or even an open discussion - is not a fair deal for the British people.

I happen to believe that a mandate from the British people matters. So let’s remember what this Labour government has done in their short two years in power. The party started by trying to steal from pensioners, while simultaneously refusing to take action against welfare cheats. Rachel Reeves raided your pay packet to throw money towards public sector fat cats. Promises to “smash the gangs” were hollow, as illegal migration through the Channel hit record highs. Digital ID was to be foisted upon people regardless of their wishes. Hardened criminals were released from prisons back onto your streets. The Chagos Islands were nearly handed over at a cost to the taxpayer, and farmers were hit by a death tax.

Not a single one of these decisions made by Keir was in Labour’s manifesto. They took your trust and threw it back in your face.

I could go on listing every deliberate policy choice this party made without bothering to consult the public. But instead, I want to ask you a question.

Where was Andy Burnham?

The man who now presumes to be our Prime Minister based on less than 25,000 votes. The man who has spent his entire life in politics, and yet who we seem to know so little about.

That, of course, is by design. When Burnham wasn’t promising Makerfield residents that a vote for him was the quickest way to remove the Prime Minister, he was pretending to anyone who would pay attention that he was really someone else.

Suddenly, he wasn’t the Andy Burnham who had served in Gordon Brown’s government (and voted for the war in Iraq), or who had lost a leadership campaign to Jeremy Corbyn. He wasn’t the Andy Burnham who campaigned for migrants to have access to public money through our benefits system, or the Burnham who thought biological men should be allowed to go into women’s toilets.

It displays nothing less than contempt for the British people for Burnham to have disguised his true beliefs in this way. But we should expect nothing less from the man who couldn’t even stand by his only honourable decision - his promise to respect the will of the people to uphold the Brexit referendum result. To men like Burnham, democracy is only a means to an end, to be discarded as soon as it is inconvenient for his personal ambitions.

That is not what I stand for, and it’s not a kind of politics I could ever support.

That is why we must have a General Election at the earliest possible opportunity. I’m not frightened of Andy Burnham or any of the other Labour Party stooges. The same applies to Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, who oppose a General Election and seem to think that it is perfectly acceptable to chop and change Prime Ministers at will. This is how the uniparty operates. The truth is that they are frightened of us. That’s why they band together at every by-election to attempt to block us from victory, why they tried to cancel the local elections and why they’ll try their very hardest to hold off on a general election for as long as possible.

Andy Burnham has good reason to be afraid of us. Reform is the only party that listens to the desires of working people and offers them solutions, rather than flattery and patronisation.

We know that Britain is broken. Growth has collapsed. Taxes are at a post-war high, and we pay more for our energy than anyone in the developed world. We hand over £100 billion a year just to service the debt racked up by the Conservatives and Labour. Our borders are wide open, our streets are lawless, and last year, a quarter of a million of our most ambitious people gave up and left. Rachel Reeves increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions has made it more expensive for businesses to hire people, and the strivers who work hard and play by the rules are punished, while those who take more than they put in are rewarded. This is the Britain that two failed parties have handed us.

Reform have a plan to take back control of our borders by leaving the ECHR and ending ILR for millions of low-skilled migrants. Our Equal Treatment Act will return your ancient rights to equal treatment before the courts. We’ll end Net Zero and the war on motorists, and restore order to your streets by jailing criminals. Small businesses and sole traders battered by Rachel Reeves will, under my government, benefit from the raising of the VAT tax threshold - because we understand that working people don’t need handouts, but to keep the money they have themselves made. Our No Tax On Overtime policy will not only benefit hard-working people, but also improve productivity in our country, which is sorely needed.

And it is my pledge to you that Britons will never again be used as a piggy bank to cover up the mistakes of the political class.

Burnham won’t solve your problems, because Labour cannot solve your problems. The party is intellectually and morally spent. Backed into a corner by the rabid hard left and their own ideological stubbornness, the only action they’re now capable of is to ban things.

Andy Burnham knows this. He doesn’t care about our borders, our rotten high streets, our energy bills or our collapsing finances. That’s why he didn’t even try and campaign on his own ideas - because he doesn’t have any. His plan for government is to act as continuity Starmer, and hope the rest of us are too stupid to notice. Burnham is drawn from the same governing class that has failed you time and time again. Only Reform is offering a genuine alternative to the same old broken status quo.

I’ve had enough of waiting around. Britain needs change - real change, not another washed-up has-been shoved into place by the uniparty.

If Labour thinks it can shove another professional politician into No 10, it has another thing coming. Reform is ready for an election, and we are ready to deliver radical change.