The Missing Mittelstand

The inaugural UK–Germany Business and Government Forum in Berlin last month missed something absolutely critical.

Treaty-level conversation was abundant, with federal ministers, ambassadors, and the CEOs of BMW, Siemens Energy, Rolls-Royce, Boehringer Ingelheim, Vodafone Germany, and Anglo American in the room.

Substantial content on defence, energy, critical minerals, and regulatory simplification. One thing struck me afterwards, thinking about my clients. The Mittelstand wasn't there. Not literally. No one was excluded.

However, the layer of the economy that defines Germany, that accounts for the bulk of its exports and most of its employment, had no seat at the table. No founder on either panel, no mid-market voice in the room. It came up twice, in passing.

The German Ambassador to the UK, HE Susanne Baumann, noted the Berlin startup scene and gestured at German tech companies setting up UK branches. A separate reference was made to UK firms operating at the same scale in Germany, bringing innovation and expertise across.

Two sentences across eight hours, then back to BMW and Siemens.

I'm not making the case that the forum got it wrong. Treaty-level conversations work at treaty level, and BMW and Siemens have problems worth a federal minister's attention. The point is different.

If you're running a £5m–£200m B2B firm trying to operate across the corridor (German Mittelstand entering the UK or UK scale-up entering Germany), the Kensington Treaty knows you exist. It just isn't going to engage with your problem operationally.

The bilateral framework will benefit you over time. But the conversion gap between "the relationship is improving" and "we won the deal in Mannheim this quarter" isn't what the forum was for.

This is a clarification. The macro story and the operating story are different stories, and the second one doesn't trickle down from the first as quickly as people assume. That's where I'll be spending my time, supporting clients across the UK–DACH corridor.