Monday 22 June 2026 11:13 am
| Updated:
Monday 22 June 2026 11:14 am
Nigel Farage has called for a General Election.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election after Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation today. In a Substack essay, Farage hit out at Andy Burnham – the likely successor to Starmer – and said that the UK could not “afford to waste another week drifting from crisis to crisis”. “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,” Farage wrote. “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.”He also said Britain was “broken” and accused Burnham of ignoring “our borders, our rotten high streets, our energy bills or our collapsing finances”. A Labour leadership contest is set to take place with nominations opening on 9 July. If Burnham is the only candidate, he will be made leader of the party and Prime Minister. Farage calls for electionTory leader Kemi Badenoch had not released a statement on Starmer’s resignation by 11am, but shortly before his announcement she said he was a “terrible Prime Minister”. She listed a number of Labour policies including Starmer’s lack of funding for defence, failing to roll out welfare reform and hiking employers’ national insurance as evidence of a party that “only want[s] higher taxes to hand out more benefits, as the welfare secretary has pointed out”. The Green Party’s Zack Polanski called for a “bold change of direction” and said Starmer had failed to “challenge the power and wealth of an establishment which has taken for themselves while leaving the vast majority in a cost of living crisis”. He added: “We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham is going to show up in Downing Street.”The Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey called for a “bold new deal” with Europe and claimed the British people were “sick of being let down by an endless merry-go-round of Prime Ministers while nothing really changes”. Labour figures including Ed Miliband, Lord Hermer, Steve Reed and Darren Jones paid tribute to Starmer for showing “dignity” in his resignation.
