Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Trump doesn’t understand how trade deficits work

After Donald Trump’s Liberation Day, the US now imposes far and away the highest tariffs of any developed country in the world. In the process of doing so Trump has completely rejected the cornerstone of the World Trade Organisation: the ‘most favoured nation’ principle whereby tariffs have to be the same on all countries you

Israel is playing a dangerous game in Syria

As Donald Trump’s tariffs dominate the headlines, in the Middle East, Israel is stepping up its campaign against Syria. Israeli air strikes hit targets across the country, including the T4 airbase in Homs, last night. The latest campaign which has been conducted over the last few months – involving dozens of air strikes and the deployment of troops – is

Philip Patrick

Japan has been stunned by the Trump tariffs

Virtually the whole world is waking up to the reality, not threat now, of President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, but in few places will the sense of shock and resultant anxiety be greater than Japan, where a whopping 24 per cent has been slapped on exports to the US. The Japanese, who have grown used

Steerpike

Scottish Tory MSP storms out ‘Trump-esque’ party

All is not well in the Scottish Tory party. Onetime leadership hopeful Jamie Greene MSP has dramatically quit the party today, announcing his exit in a scathing letter to current leader Russell Findlay. Raging that the group has become ‘Trump-esque in both style and substance’, Greene fumed that the Scottish Conservatives were at risk of

Michael Simmons

This could be the largest US tax rise in half a century

Across the world, markets are plunging as they respond to the global tariffs Donald Trump unleashed from the White House rose garden last night – with the president’s top economist describing the falls as ‘short-term bumps’. The pound passed $1.30 for the first time in six months while stocks in Tokyo fell 4 per cent.

Trump’s tariffs are just bizarre

They would restore manufacturing, force trade barriers to be taken down, and allow new industries to be created. There have been various different explanations for why President Trump’s new tariff regime made sense. And yet when they were finally revealed yesterday one point was clear. There was no logic. The tariffs were just weird. The

Kate Andrews

Can Trump defend his tariff calculations?

When President Trump held up an easel in the White House Rose Garden illustrating each country’s ‘tariffs charged to the USA’ and the new ‘U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs’, there appeared to be some small print underneath the first column, barely readable. Then printed copies started to circulate the garden. Underneath the column showing each country’s

The growing controversy over Ireland’s neutrality

As the war of words between Donald Trump and the EU continues to escalate, European countries have become increasingly concerned about their military reliance on the United States. As a result, the need to increase defence spending has become a major issue. Germany has abandoned its ‘debt lock’ as it seeks to raise more funds

Kate Andrews

Trump has bet the house on tariffs

‘My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day’, Donald Trump told the audience that had gathered in the Rose Garden for his official signing of his executive order to put import levies on goods imported to the United States from around the world. There was no hesitation, there were no caveats: only utter enthusiasm from both

Ross Clark

Trump’s tariffs are a real Brexit win

So, Britain has got its trade deal with the US – of sorts. Donald Trump has awarded Britain no exemption from his tariffs. Even so, he has left Britain off lightly, by imposing tariffs of 10 per cent on imports from Britain to the US – the lowest he imposed on any country, along with

Michael Simmons

Trump prepares to take his tariff war global

In just a few hours, Donald Trump is set to take his tariff war global. At 9 p.m. UK time (4 p.m. in Washington), the American President will unveil a sweeping set of trade tariffs, on what he’s dubbed ‘Liberation Day’. What exactly Trump plans to announce remains unclear, but reports suggest everything from global

Stephen Daisley

Robert Jenrick is a real conservative

Robert Jenrick’s victory over the Sentencing Council — James Heale is correct to call it that — is, more importantly, a victory for the new style of Toryism the shadow justice secretary is beginning to articulate. There’s no dressing it up: what the Sentencing Council proposed was the introduction of race-based differential treatment to England’s

Lloyd Evans

I am deeply impressed by Ayoub Khan

Kemi Badenoch is doing all right at PMQs. The Tory leader is effective in the build-up but her finishing is weak. The point of the inquisition is make the interviewee tremble with fear. Here’s how she ended each of today’s question to Sir Keir Starmer: ‘What’s his advice to business owners laying off staff?’ ‘Why

Steerpike

Arron Banks battles Bristol Council for ‘Banksy’ slogan

It’s all kicking off in Bristol. On Friday, Reform UK announced that the multimillionaire Arron Banks was going to be their candidate for the mayoralty of the West of England. But the self-proclaimed ‘bad boy of Brexit’ faces opposition from overzealous apparatchiks on Bristol City Council. Officials from the Green-run authority have told Banks that

Ed West

What really scares people about Adolescence

Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper

Isabel Hardman

Starmer and Badenoch played a childish blame game at PMQs

Keir Starmer had a special point to make at the very outset of Prime Minister’s Questions about the threat of tariffs from the US. He told the Commons that ‘a trade war is in nobody’s interest and the country deserves, and we will take, a calm, pragmatic approach’. He added that the government ‘will rule

Steerpike

Patrick Harvie’s top five lowlights

Patrick Harvie has today announced – and not a moment too soon – that he will step down as co-leader of the Scottish Greens this summer. It will end his tenure as Holyrood’s longest-serving party chief after he clung onto the top job for almost 17 years. To mark the occasion, Mr S has compiled

Kemi Badenoch must not drop net zero

Giorgia Meloni had it right. ‘There is nothing,’ the Italian prime minister said in 2022, ‘more right-wing than ecology. The right loves the environment because it loves the land, the identity, the homeland.’ Like centre-right parties across Europe, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is committed to net zero. While Kemi Badenoch was correct in her

Sadiq Khan’s Eid message is a disgrace

London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan published a video online earlier this week to mark the Muslim festival of Eid. Released under the guise of seasonal goodwill, this glib social media greeting is not merely problematic – it is an outright disgrace. Cloaked in the warm language of unity and peace, the Mayor of London delivered

Ross Clark

Labour’s welfare crackdown is a sham

You can already sense Rachel Reeves’s spin machine whirring into action. It was Donald Trump wot ruined my careful book-keeping, the Chancellor will tell us as once again her fiscal headroom disappears and she ends up banging her scalp painfully on the ceiling. But could it be unrealistic expectations for her welfare reforms which prove

Steerpike

Starmer claims Adolescence is a documentary – again

Does Prime Minister Keir Starmer understand the difference between fact and fiction? Mr S isn’t so sure – after the Labour leader referred to the new Netflix series Adolescence as a documentary for the, er, second time. Either Sir Keir is ignorant about what exactly the show is – which, given he has referred to

Steerpike

Support for Labour drops to new poll low

Support for Labour has dipped to a new low in more bad news for the reds. Data released today reveals that support for Sir Keir Starmer’s party has dropped to the lowest level yet in a More in Common survey, with Westminster voting intention for Starmer’s army at just 21 per cent – leaving the

Israel is gambling that military action can end the war in Gaza

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is to launch a large-scale expansion of its military operations to seize and occupy more territory. This is to exploit what the Israeli government sees as growing antipathy towards Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the biggest gamble taken by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, since the ceasefire deal

Why Israel is ramping up its war on terror

The war in Gaza has entered a more consequential and unforgiving phase. Early this morning, Palestinian sources reported that Israeli tanks had begun advancing into central Rafah, following a night of intense airstrikes across the southern Gaza Strip. This military escalation came after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced the expansion of Operation ‘Oz veCherev’

Trump’s tariffs are coming back to bite him

Liberation Day? Pshaw. President Trump may be gloating about imposing sweeping tariffs on America’s allies and adversaries abroad, but he is beginning to face blowback at home for his strange farrago of policies that are upending the federal government and threatening to plunge America into a self-induced recession. First Senator Cory Booker raised the flagging

We’re still suffering from social long Covid

It’s not unusual, after running a focus group, for a particular comment to stay with you for days. Ordinary people who aren’t hyper engaged in politics are often far better at capturing the state of the country than any political soundbites. It was Clive, a crane driver from Dudley, who made one of those remarks

Mark Galeotti

Are Western companies heading back to Russia?

Ever since Donald Trump’s now-infamous phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last month, Russia has been buzzing with speculation that Western companies which left the country after the 2022 invasion, especially US ones, will be returning. For some, this is a dream, for others a nightmare. Either way, it seems to be an overblown prospect fuelled

Trump’s tariff plan has been tried before. It failed

Donald Trump thinks ‘tariff’ is the ‘most beautiful word in the dictionary’. Today is ‘Liberation Day’, and the US president is holding true to his campaign trail promise to impose tariffs on imports. Cars, steel and aluminium are expected to be hit with levies of up to 25 per cent. A 10 to 20 per