Burnham should offer British nukes to Europe, says former German ambassador

Andy Burnham should publicly offer to provide a nuclear umbrella over Europe if he becomes the UK’s next leader, a top European diplomat told The i Paper.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the UK and US, who is now chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said the next prime minister should join France in publicly offering nuclear capabilities for the European continent – including, long-term, Ukraine.

The UK and France are the only two European countries to have sovereign nuclear weapons. French President Emmanuel Macron said earlier this year that he was willing to discuss providing a nuclear umbrella for the continent.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

England’s stunning victory over the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may have England fans elated, but some are wondering if Tuchel is still the right choice to lead the team to a World Cup victory.

England had never lost to an African side in a World Cup match, and only once in their entire history.

Inside seven minutes, a defensive calamity and mistake from Jordan Pickford put the DRC on the cusp of history. 

It was Kane’s two goals within the last fifteen minutes of the match which saw England narrowly take the win.

England’s full-backs were a mess against DRC because Tuchel went weird with his selection and Ezri Konsa looks jumpy.

Gareth Southgate protected an average defence that was the weak point of the team and England became boring to the point of fault. Tuchel is ostensibly doing mostly the same but without the defensive protection bit.

England now face Mexico in Mexico: far harder, far more altitude, far better opponent, far more febrile atmosphere. The worry from Atlanta that won’t leave this brain: what if better are better against us and we’re already living on the edge of incompetence?

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.

They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.

One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door. 

She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.

We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…

I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.

Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.

She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.

It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.

Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.

Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.

On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.

I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender. 

But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.

It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.

According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.

The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them. 

National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.

In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.

Hunt them down

Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.

Check everything

You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.

Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.

Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.

“I think if these two nuclear powers could put together and make that kind of a statement together, that would be my dream,” Ischinger said.

He added that it would enhance European security if the UK could tell its European Nato partners that it was “ready to start discussions” about how its nuclear capabilities “can be put to the best possible use, not only in terms of defending your own homeland, but in terms of defending Europe”.

Ischinger said this should include non-EU members, like Norway, Turkey and even Ukraine in the future.

With Russian aggression rising and doubts over the US’s commitment to guaranteeing European security under Donald Trump, pressure is growing on Nato allies to ramp up defence commitments.

The UK has four nuclear-armed submarines, one of which continuously operates on patrol at sea, which are set to be updated in the 2030s. It already provides its nuclear capabilities to Nato, of which most European countries are members, and has done since 1962. This means it effectively already offers a nuclear deterrent to the majority of the European continent.

A Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesperson told The i Paper: “We are the only European ally to commit its nuclear deterrent to the defence of Nato. This means that all Nato allies, including those in Europe, already benefit from the protection of our nuclear deterrent.”

However, Ischinger said that a public statement of intent with France would refresh and assert the UK’s commitment to nuclear deterrence and send a strong signal to Russia, while ensuring all European members were protected.

“I’m always thinking about what our friends in Moscow think,” he said. “If future prime minister Burnham and the President of France would take some kind of step along these lines, I think that will be noted as a serious declaration of determination and defence and deterrence by two nations which have a mission of leading Europe.”

Europe has long relied on the notion that the US, with its vast nuclear arsenal, would be enough to deter nuclear conflict. But in light of Trump’s growing divergence from Europe, policymakers are considering whether Europe needs a stronger nuclear shield of its own.

In March, Macron said he had decided to “open the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent”. He suggested that French nuclear capabilities could be temporarily stationed in other European countries.

The Danish and Polish prime ministers welcomed the comments. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever also backed the idea of a pan-European “nuclear umbrella”.

The UK and France could never replace the American arsenal, with far more limited capabilities, but they may help strengthen the case against a Russian invasion of eastern Europe.

“With storm clouds continuing to gather over Europe and the American nuclear umbrella seeming increasingly unreliable, European states have turned to the UK and to France for cover and are expecting them to rise to the challenge,” said Darya Dolzikova​ and Héloïse Fayet of defence think-tank RUSI.

Dolzikova told The i Paper that the UK would be less able to offer capabilities to Europe than France because, unlike Paris, London already has nuclear commitments to Nato and has a less diverse nuclear portfolio.

“In the UK, we’re a little bit more constrained, because we have our deterrent committed to Nato,” she said. “Also, our posture is limited in the sense that, unlike the French – who have both their submarines and the air-launched capabilities – we only have submarines.

“It’s a lot easier to forward-base and to signal visibly with fighter jets than it is to do that with submarines.”

However, any change to the UK’s nuclear position would be “complicated, costly, and time-consuming,” Dolzikova said. “Changing our nuclear posture would be a decades-long process at a time when we’re already scrambling to raise defence spending, meet obligations to Nato, and already trying to deliver on modernisation of the production of new submarines.”

Dolzikova said she talks to people across Europe and asked specifically what they would expect the UK to do differently. “And nobody can give me an answer, because the UK’s nuclear doctrine is very, very opaque.”

But in the short term, more political signalling, like Ishinger suggested, might help, Dolzikova said, including being more open about the workings of the UK-France nuclear steering group.
Dolzikova said the French do strategic communication on their nuclear deterrent very effectively. “I don’t think we’ve quite figured out what that looks like for the UK yet,” she added. “I think there’s a lot of work to be done on that… [which] can help both deter adversaries more effectively, but also assure our allies in Europe.”