Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Why a win for landlords is a win for everyone

There was victory for a group of mortgage borrowers last week when Court of Appeal judges ruled West Bromwich Building Society had wrongly upped interest rates for about 6,000 customers. However, despite the legal wrangle being described as a ‘David and Goliath’ type duel, not everyone was pleased for the little people winners. That’s because

Brexit chances surge: live chart of bookmakers’ odds

Two polls putting Leave well clear of Remain – five points according to yesterday’s Guardian/ICM poll, seven points  according to a Times/YouGov poll  – have seen bookies slash their odds on Brexit, implying that it’s more likely than ever before – as shown by the chart above. A few weeks ago, the betting markets thought there was

Isabel Hardman

Why Leave is looking so comfortable in the EU referendum

We are definitely now in squeaky bum territory in the EU referendum. Leave has a seven point lead in today’s Times/YouGov poll, while yesterday the Guardian/ICM poll put Leave six points ahead. Meanwhile the Sun has splashed on its backing for Leave. It isn’t a huge surprise that the Sun is supporting Britain leaving the European

Tom Goodenough

Coffee House shots: It’s Labour day!

There are now only ten days to go until the EU referendum and in a bid to regain momentum, Labour figures from the past and present are this week putting the case forward for staying in the EU. Today, it was Gordon Brown’s turn to try and convince wavering Labour supporters why Britain is better

Tom Goodenough

ICM poll shows Leave six points ahead

An ICM poll released this afternoon shows that 53 per cent of voters are backing Brexit compared to 47 per cent who want Britain to stay in the EU. And just ten days to go until the EU referendum. Today’s poll is further evidence in support of momentum towards Leave: an ICM poll two weeks

Ed West

You can’t stop future Orlandos, but you can reduce the chances

I’m pro-gun control, but I come from the most heavily populated corner of one of the most crowded islands on earth, where it’s appropriate. I also grew up in a city and have only fired a gun once, which was basically an air rifle, and the results were predictably Woody Allenesque. But gun control may

Nick Cohen

Homophobia is now met with the same silence given to anti-Semitism

Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer’s greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody’s fool. Better that than

Rent hikes, a wealth tax and huge growth in money transfers

The cost of renting a one-bedroom property in the UK has soared to swallow almost half of the average young worker’s take-home pay, according to figures published in The Guardian, while those living in London are typically handing over 57 per cent of their monthly wages. Data from property firm Countrywide showed that the average

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron’s Brexit threat to pensioners is a new low

Campaigns only last for a few weeks, but politicians can be defined by what they say during those campaigns. Ed Miliband will never live down the #EdStone, Zac Goldsmith will always be stained by his murkier attacks on Sadiq Khan – and I suspect David Cameron will never manage to shake off the threat he made to

Steerpike

The Guardian declares war on street parties: ‘a front for a middle-class nationalism that celebrates austerity’

Barely a week goes by without the Guardian declaring war on a seemingly harmless food type. According to the paper tea-drinkers possess ‘the worst possible English trait, up there with colonialism‘, HP sauce is the condiment of the establishment and barbecues are simply borderline-racist. Now they have a new enemy in their sights: street parties. Although tens of thousands

Steerpike

I’m no bottle blond: Boris denies dying his hair

There has been speculation for a while that Boris’s fabled mop may have had a touch of the Marilyn Monroe to it. Last year, celebrity hairdresser Heinz Schumi claimed it was a ‘forgery’. ‘I’m telling you, it’s bleached,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I went to see him give a speech, and when the spotlights shone on his hair, it

Ed West

Why do we indulge the crimes of the Left?

What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm: Ignatieff: In 1934 … millions of

Spectator competition winners: #RemoveALetterSpoilABook (Lady Chatterley’s Over; Rainspotting; Far from the Adding Crowd; The Forsythe Aga)

The latest challenge, prompted by the hashtag #RemoveALetterSpoilABook that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter, saw you at your best. Among many highlights in a whopping, inventive entry were Robert Schechter’s A Clockwork Orange, which featured Donald Trump’s manhood, and a turn by Ted Hughes in Katie Mallett’s Far from the Madding Crow. Other star

Ross Clark

Google isn’t racist – but it is filthy

Is Google racist?  That is the charge made in a short video in which someone types ‘three white teenagers’ and ‘three black teenagers’ into the Google images and finds that while the former brings up images of happy, smiling students, the latter brings up what appear to be police mugshots. Given that Google searches do

Transcript: Nigel Farage grilled by Andrew Neil on Brexit

This is an abridged transcript of Nigel Farage’s Brexit interview with Andrew Neil IMMIGRATION Reducing the level of immigration has been central to your pitch to voters, can you tell the British public at what level broadly you’d expect net migration to fall if we left the EU? Up to us. The point about this