As 2025 draws to a close, I can’t remember the country ever being gloomier. People are getting poorer. More people are becoming unemployed. 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 frightened now to walk down the street wearing a watch, wearing jewellery. Oh, and by the way, if you see anything rude on Facebook, you may well get a knock at the door!

Well, I’ve come here today to Greenwich to have a think about what this country used to be, what it represented, and what it can become.

Greenwich was here at the very height of Britain’s naval power. And that wasn’t just about winning the Battle of Trafalgar and 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.

We have an enormous amount of our past to be proud of, and yet our education system under both of the last governments now teaches our kids to be ashamed of the past.

Well, the first thing a Reform government will do is make sure kids are taught correctly about our history.

But if you look behind these magnificent buildings, you see Canary Wharf, you see the 21st century, and not just traditional stocks and shares and bonds, but a whole new world developing: a world of cryptocurrencies, a world of AI, a world of digital assets.

And neither the Conservative or Labour seem to even understand this world in any way at all. Let me promise you that we do. These are the technologies of growth as we head forward in this century.

But none of it can be done unless we produce our own energy, lots of it, and at cheap rates. Because of fanatical net zero policies, we will literally be left behind.

One in seven of you own a digital asset of some kind. Yet the government, the authorities, simply don’t seem to care. And that’s 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 El-Fattah case. Here’s a guy that’s come out of Egypt, come back to Britain, who’s put out the most abominable, hateful tweets about killing Jews, killing white people, fighting the police.

And this man was given citizenship by the Conservative Party and welcomed back into Britain by the Labour Party. Frankly, there is little to choose between the two.

We’re the people offering hope. We’re the people offering change. And 2025 showed you, with those county elections which we won comfortably, what we are capable of.

As we look forward to 2026, we have a massive set of elections: the whole of Scotland and 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 you want to cancel the elections, in some cases for the second year in a row, you can do so.

And already East and West Sussex, controlled by the Conservatives, have said, thank you very much, we’ll cancel the elections. That is the kind of authoritarian country that we are now living in.

They’re even beginning to take away our right to vote. Well, they’ll cancel some, but most of those elections will 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 those elections, if we come top, it will put us way ahead of the other parties. Already, we’ve led for 175 opinion polls in a row. Our average lead is 10%. If we get this right on May the 7th this year, we will go on and win that general election.

We will then absolutely have a chance of genuinely, fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain. We may well be the last chance this country has to actually restore some proper values.

Those are family, community, country, the ones upon which I based this policy 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.