Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

James Heale James Heale

Farage’s latest hero? Benjamin Disraeli

At 9 a.m on Monday morning, Nigel Farage will march into a central London venue to make one of his most audacious speeches yet. Since returning as leader of Reform UK last May, he has trodden carefully when it comes to policy. Farage quickly canned the party’s manifesto after the election, preferring to focus on a few key areas: lifting the two-child benefit cap, hiking the annual income tax personal allowance to £20,000, cutting council waste, abolishing Net Zero and renationalising steel. But his next move is more original in its thinking. Farage will announce a new policy for ‘non-doms’: British residents whose permanent home for tax purposes is outside

Jonathan Spyer

Iran is isolated against the US and Israel

America’s entry into the war against Iran is the latest step up an escalation spiral that began in October 2023. What started with an attack by a Palestinian Islamist organisation on a poorly defended Israeli border, and then became a fight between Israel and a series of Iran-supported Islamist paramilitary groups by the end of 2023, and then extended to limited exchanges between Israel and Iran itself in April 2024, and then turned into war between Iran and Israel, has now become a confrontation pitting the US and Israel against their longest standing and most powerful adversary in the Islamic world. Now at war with both Israel and the US, it

James Heale James Heale

Keir Starmer is not having a good war

This is not been Keir Starmer’s finest week on the world stage. At the G7 on Tuesday, the Prime Minister breezily dismissed talk that the Americans would shortly join Israeli’s attack on Iran. ‘There’s nothing the President said that suggests he’s about to get involved in this conflict,’ he insisted. ‘On the contrary, throughout the dinner yesterday, I was sitting right next to President Trump, so I’ve no doubt in my mind the level of agreement there was.’ Within hours, Trump left Alberta to return to the White House Situation Room and approve the final attack plan for Iran. Then there was the row over whether US bombers would launch

Nigel Jones

Nigel Farage is looking unstoppable

Opinion polls are notoriously a snapshot rather than a prediction, but the latest Ipsos survey of more than 1,100 voters should put a huge spring in Nigel Farage’s step, and terrify both the Tories and Labour, who are placed nine points behind the surging populists. The poll gives the highest ever level of support for Reform The poll states that if a general election were held tomorrow, a Reform government would be elected on 34 per cent of the vote, putting Reform leader Nigel Farage in 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister with a massive majority. Labour would be reduced to 25 per cent, and the Tories to just 15 per

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Trump is making the world a safer place

Strength works. It’s a foreign policy lesson that sounds too simple to be true and too unequivocal to be wise, and yet there is much truth and a good deal of wisdom in it. Strength does not mean wanton thuggery or hubristic swagger, it must be considered, well-regulated and guided by reflection and sober analysis. But when it is properly deployed to clear and realistic ends, strength can achieve results that negotiation, compromise and avoidance cannot. Strength, when put in service of just goals, can sometimes be the preferable moral option, checking threats, risks and baneful intentions. At some point, US and European foreign policy elites are going to have

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Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The UK economy has returned to its pre-pandemic size

Nearly two years after the UK experienced its biggest economic collapse in 300 years, the economy has returned to pre-pandemic levels. GDP is estimated by the ONS to have grown by 0.9 per cent in November, almost twice what had been expected – making it 0.7 per cent larger than it was in February 2020. The US and Sweden managed to pass pre-pandemic levels last spring. China took just a few months. But Britain, whose economy fell further than almost any developed country in 2020, is catching up. Britain, whose economy fell further than almost any developed country in 2020, is catching up The below chart shows how UK growth

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Covid pingdemic takes its toll on Britain’s economic bounce-back

The arrival of ‘freedom day’ on 19 July enabled people to return to concerts, festivals, and ditch social distancing, but these rediscovered freedoms did not revive the economy. The ONS said this morning that growth was just 0.1 per cent in July, far lower than the consensus forecast. It was particularly disappointing given the growth seen in the locked-down months of June (one per cent) and May (0.6 per cent). The Pingdemic – and concerns about the Delta variant – cancelled out any animal spirits around reopening. August’s GDP boost is going to need to be much stronger for the more bullish forecasts to pan out Nightclubs reopened and the entertainment

Thursday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Britain’s economic recovery break records?

It’s been a good week for seeing the vaccine factor at work. We’ve had multiple real-world updates on the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against new variants of Covid-19 (this bodes well for the UK, which was the first country in the world to use the vaccine to protect its most vulnerable residents). And today we’ve had a revised economic forecast from the Bank of England, suggesting the UK’s impressive vaccine rollout could translate into the strongest growth since records began in 1949. The Bank of England now predicts that the economy will expand by more than 7 per cent in 2021, up from its forecast of 5 per cent in February. Its

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Covid cost less than expected?

It’s no surprise that the bill for Covid-19 keeps racking up. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest forecast predicts borrowing will reach £355 billion for the financial year: decisions to extend furlough, boosting public sector spending and supporting businesses that have been closed for months at a time all come with a price tag attached. But that doesn’t stop the sums from creating shock and awe each time they’re announced. Today’s update from the Office for National Statistics shows that government borrowing hit £19 billion last month — more than £17 billion from the previous year and the highest borrowing recorded for February since records began in 1993.  Operating on the assumption that