Brexit was supposed to pull Britain away from Europe. Yet 10 years on, Britain’s new prime minister is championing ideas that look strikingly familiar to Germans. So why is Andy Burnham borrowing from a model that Germany itself is starting to question? In this episode of Berlin Briefing, Nina Haase and Richard Walker talk to London-based German journalists Annette Dittert and Birgit Maass to decipher why Andy Burnham and Friedrich Merz have more in common than meets the eye, how London may say goodbye to the Westminster System and follow a more Bund and Länder playbook, how Labour’s new social policies are keen to take a leaf out of Germany’s constitutional Basic Law, and what the new prime minister and his cabinet will mean for Britain’s NATO allies.
00:00 Why Burnham is looking to Germany
03:34 Why the UK keeps changing leaders
07:02 The cost of living crisis
10:53 A German model for Britain?
15:31 Regional power, the German way
19:05 Shared problems, different leaders
22:29 How Britain and Germany face the far right
26:33 Berlin’s first signals to Burnham
29:21 Meet Burnham’s inner circle
32:03 Defense spending meets industrial policy
34:46 Europe’s Trump challenge
37:51 Can Burnham succeed where others failed?
Berlin Briefing won the UK’s Publisher Podcast award for Best Political Podcast: https://publisherpodcasts.com/2026/en/page/winners-2026
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