The US and the EU have signed a trade deal setting a 15% tariff on all EU exports to America. Donald Trump finalised the agreement in a short meeting with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland yesterday, calling it “the biggest deal ever struck by anybody”. Keir Starmer will meet the US president this afternoon in a bid to increase pressure on Israel and secure a ceasefire deal in the Middle East. The PM is also expected to recall his cabinet from their summer break this week for an emergency meeting on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The England women’s football team became back-to-back European champions last night after beating Spain on penalties. The Lionesses will attend a celebratory reception at Downing Street today, followed by a victory parade in central London tomorrow. “I am so proud of this team,” said Chloe Kelly, who scored the winning penalty (below), “and I’m so proud to be English.”

Are the Epping protests a sign of wider malaise?

The recent protests in the genteel Essex town of Epping should serve as a “warning shot” to our leaders, says Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. The spark for the disorder was the arrest of an Ethiopian asylum seeker – one of 140 relocated by the Home Office to a hotel there – on suspicion of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl. But the anger fuelling the violence runs much deeper. Put simply, “something is rotten in the state of Britain”. Our rivers are full of excrement, a quarter of the working-age population is classified as disabled, shoplifting is at a record high. And Keir Starmer’s government doesn’t seem to know what to about it. Nigel Farage may be overegging things to warn of mass civil disobedience. But if violence can break out in this sleepy corner of Essex, “it can happen anywhere, at any time”.

Enough of this “relentless doomerism”, says Sam Freedman on Substack. The overwhelming majority of Brits wouldn’t go near a violent riot – 72% think the draconian sentences handed down to those convicted over last year’s Southport disorder were either fair or “not harsh enough”. Crime is falling, with violence, burglary and car crime down around 90% since the 1990s. The number of asylum seekers in hotels has gone from 56,000 in 2023 to probably below 30,000 today, and is on course to drop to zero by 2029. And talk of immigrants failing to integrate is pure baloney – on “every measure we have”, racial segregation is falling. Yes, Britain is in a “somewhat fragile state” and frustration at politicians is understandably high. But plenty of trends are going in the right direction, and the general mood is “nowhere near as gloomy” as many commentators make out.

🗳️😔 MPs get a lot of stick for the failures of our immigration and asylum system, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Yet most of them are “desperate” to stop the boats, if only for reasons of self-interest. The problem is that fixing the issues would involve deep structural changes: extricating ourselves from international treaties, scrapping a mass of domestic laws and so on. And this sort of thing “leaves most voters cold”. They’re much more interested in supposedly simple solutions such as forcing small boats to turn back mid-Channel – “as if no one had tried that before”.