Nigel Farage said Britain should hold a general election “at the soonest possible date” after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation and Labour began preparing for a leadership contest.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called Monday for a general election after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation, arguing that any successor installed by Labour without a national vote would lack a public mandate to govern.
Starmer’s announcement added to a rapid period of political instability in London, making him the sixth British leader in the past decade to be forced from office. His resignation followed mounting pressure inside the Labour Party after a poor showing in May’s local elections, where Farage’s Reform UK topped polls and showed it could win councils previously viewed as reliable Labour territory.
Although Starmer said he would resign, he also indicated he planned to remain in office through the summer while Labour organizes a leadership contest and his government completes its remaining work. Andy Burnham, the recently elected MP who left his post as Manchester mayor to seek a seat in Parliament with the stated aim of removing Starmer, quickly confirmed Monday that he would run to become Labour leader and prime minister.
Burnham, who has twice before failed to win the Labour leadership, appeared positioned as the leading candidate after Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Monday he would support the new Makerfield MP. Other Labour figures could still enter the race before the party’s July leadership contest.
A new Labour leader would not be legally required to call a general election, because a prime minister’s authority formally depends on support in the House of Commons. But Farage said the public should decide who governs after another change in leadership at the top of the British government.
“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,” Farage wrote.
Farage said the repeated turnover in prime ministers had become “farcical” and “reminiscent of post-war Italy.” He also argued that Labour voters who backed the party in 2024 did not authorize another internal leadership change without a public vote.
“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,” Farage commented.
Farage accused Labour of losing its governing mandate by departing from the platform on which it won power in 2024. He cited tax increases, failure to “smash the gangs” behind English Channel migrant smuggling, support for Digital IDs, the death tax on farmers and efforts to hand over the Chagos Islands as examples of Starmer government policies that he said were not included in Labour’s manifesto.
Farage also focused criticism on Burnham, saying voters know little about the man expected to become Britain’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. Farage argued in a video statement that Burnham’s career in politics has included shifts in position that deserve national scrutiny before he enters Downing Street.
“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,” Farage said. “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,” Farage said.
Farage said Burnham’s record showed “contempt for the British people,” accusing him of treating democracy as useful only when it benefits his own advancement.
“For 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 said.
Farage was not the only political figure to raise the prospect of an election after Starmer’s resignation. Labour minister Mike Tapp MP said the law should be changed so that “if a change of leader is forced by its own Party then a General Election must be called” in order to prevent the “constant churn” in Westminster.
The debate over whether voters should be returned to the polls now centers on Labour’s planned leadership contest, Burnham’s expected bid for the premiership and Farage’s argument that the public, rather than Westminster, should decide who leads the country next.
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