The German problem? It’s an analogue country in a digital world

A German car worker at VW helps produce the ID.3 electric car in Zwickau, eastern Germany. Germany’s big car companies were woefully shortsighted when meeting the existential threat posed by low-cost Chinese models. Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

Sir Keir Starmer is not the first Labour leader to hanker after a closer relationship between Britain and Germany. Jim Callaghan snuggled up close to the chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the 1970s, and ever since there has been a sense among the social democratic left in the UK that there is much to be learned from Europe’s biggest economy.

The Germans, it has been said repeatedly down the decades, have a superior model of capitalism: based on good design and skilled workmanship; stable, long-term funding arrangements between businesses and the banks; a more consensual system of industrial relations; a network of medium-sized companies, many of them family-owned; a top-notch system of vocational and technical training that ensures a steady supply of skilled, productive workers.