NIGEL FARAGE shares his New Year tackle with Daily Mail readers: I’ve by no means recognized Britain really feel gloomier. Here’s how Reform may give EVERY voter hope subsequent 12 months

As 2025 draws to a close, I can’t remember the country ever being gloomier. People are getting poorer. Unemployment is rising. Inflation is proving sticky and our debt is running completely out of control — with a Chancellor who doesn’t seem to have a clue what she’s doing.

Worse than that, people are increasingly frightened to walk down the street wearing a watch or their jewellery. And if you say anything rude on Facebook, you may well get a knock at the door.

This year I’ll be making my annual New Year’s speech in Greenwich, south London. I believe it’s an important place to think about what this country used to be, what it represented, and what it can become.

Greenwich was at the very height of Britain’s naval power. This handsome district by the River Thames played a pivotal role in our rich history of maritime dominance and global navigation.

And that dominance wasn’t just about winning the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It wasn’t just about building the biggest Empire the world had ever seen. It was also about a Royal Navy that spent decades, at huge cost, driving slavery off the high seas, something of which British people are rightly proud.

In fact, we have an enormous amount to be proud of, and yet our education system under both of the last governments has been teaching our children to be ashamed of their past. 

One of the first things a Reform government will do is make sure the young are taught correctly about our history.

But beyond Greenwich’s magnificent buildings such as Sir Christopher Wren’s Old Royal Naval College, you can see the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. Here, not just traditional stocks, shares and bonds are being traded, but a whole new world is developing: a world of AI, financial innovation and digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. 

I know many feel hopeless, but we’re the party offering hope. We’re the ones offering change

This year I’ll be making my annual New Year’s speech in Greenwich, south London. I believe it’s an important place to think about what this country used to be, what it represented, and what it can become

Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a guy from Egypt who’s put out the most abominable, hateful tweets about killing Jews and white people and fighting the police. And yet this man was given citizenship by the Conservative Party and welcomed back into Britain by Labour

And neither the Conservative nor Labour parties seem to understand this world in any way at all.

Let me promise you that we do. These are the technologies of growth as we all head forward in this century. But none of it can be harnessed unless we produce our own energy, lots of it, and at cheap rates. 

And because of fanatical net zero policies pursued by both Labour and the Tories, Britain will literally be left behind.

One in seven Britons now owns a digital asset such as bitcoin. As a former commodities trader during the rip-roaring ‘Big Bang’ days of the 1980s, I can tell you that cryptocurrencies are firmly here to stay. 

Not only do they offer individuals the ultimate freedom from big government and state interference, but they represent a golden opportunity for our economy.

You may not sense it yet – but believe me that we are at the dawn of a crypto revolution, and there is an exciting chance to make the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation. I would go as far to say that I believe this really could be the City’s second ‘Big Bang’ moment.

Yet the government, the authorities, simply don’t seem to care. The first instinct of the status-quo merchants within Labour and the Conservative is to regulate cryptocurrencies to death. And that is precisely the point. We need change in this country, real change. And if we go on voting for the same old parties, I promise you nothing will change.

Think, just in the last few days, of the Alaa Abd El-Fattah case. Here’s a guy from Egypt who’s put out the most abominable, hateful tweets about killing Jews and white people and fighting the police.

 The government needs to strip this Egyptian hatemonger of his undeserved British citizenship and kick him out the country – now, before it is too late

Please make it your New Year’s resolution to do something. Support Reform. Join Reform. Go out and spread the message that we are the party of hope

And yet this man was given citizenship by the Conservative Party and welcomed back into Britain by Labour. The government needs to strip this Egyptian hatemonger of his undeserved British citizenship and kick him out the country – now, before it is too late.

Labour and the Tories claim that they never knew about his poisonous tweets. Come off it. Back in 2014, the European Union disqualified El-Fattah from a major award because of his vile social media posts. More than a decade later, we are expected to believe that these came as ‘unexpected’ news to the UK government.

Remember: we cannot remove British citizenship if it leaves an individual stateless. So, if Cairo beats Britain to it, and removes El-Fattah’s Egyptian citizenship, we will be stuck with him. And who benefits from that?

I know many feel hopeless, but we’re the party offering hope. We’re the ones offering change. And 2025 showed you, with the county elections where we comfortably won more seats than any other party, what we are capable of. 

As we look forward to 2026, we face a massive set of elections: the whole of Scotland, the whole of Wales, all 32 London boroughs and thousands of council seats all over the country.

And yet, what are we now seeing? We’re seeing a Labour government saying to those councils that if they want to cancel the elections, in some cases for the second year in a row, they should feel free to do so. 

And already East and West Sussex, controlled by the Conservatives, have said yes, thank you very much, we’ll cancel the elections. That is the kind of authoritarian country that we are now living in – where they’re even beginning to take away our right to vote.

Well, they’ll cancel some, but most of those elections will still go ahead. They will be the single most important set of elections between now and the next general election. I’ll make this prediction: if Reform win the local elections later this year, it will put us way ahead of the other parties. 

Already, we’ve led for over 175 opinion polls in a row, with an average lead of 10 per cent. If we get this right on May 7 this year, we will go on and win the general election, due in 2029 at the latest.

We will then absolutely have a chance of fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain. We may well be the last chance this country has to restore some proper values: of family, community and country. The values on which I based this party when I founded it in the very beginning.

But we cannot do this without you. And you will not get the change you want without us. So let me ask you one thing. Please make it your New Year’s resolution to do something. Support Reform. Join Reform. 

Go out and spread the message that we are the party of hope. We are the party of change. And we are genuinely the last chance for Britain.