Über Alles

Jakob Kaiser’s vision was of a German Christian Democracy that looked to British Labour for its inspiration in giving effect to Catholic Social Teaching, and which gave such effect by emphasising co-operatives, the public ownership of key industries, extensive social insurance, and the works councils later suggested in the SDP’s founding Limehouse Declaration and advocated by David Owen, who is close to Ed Miliband, while also seeking a United Germany as a bridge between East and West, allied neither to NATO nor to the Soviet Bloc.

We need the German patterns of regional banking with close ties to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, of worker representation on company boards, of small and medium-sized family businesses on the Mittelstand model, and of vocational as well as general skills training, accorded the same respect as a very high level of academic achievement that Germany has also retained and which we need to restore in the United Kingdom.