The appointment last month of James Murray as Health Secretary caused alarm among women’s organizations. Murray, who was previously a vocal supporter of gender ideology, clearly realized he needed to engage in damage limitation, and in recent interviews has claimed that he no longer believes “trans women are women.” But now his commitment is being tested. Murray is reportedly refusing to honor a commitment made by his predecessor, Wes Streeting, to meet the Darlington nurses who won a landmark victory over their right to single-sex spaces in January. Bethany Hutchison, President of the Darlington Nursing Union, has confirmed that today’s scheduled meeting will not go ahead.

A pattern is emerging here. The Government says the right things about accepting the Supreme Court judgment on the primacy of biological sex, but ministers don’t seem keen on its implementation. The issue is particularly acute in the NHS, where many trusts still allow trans-identified males to use women’s changing rooms and toilets, in open breach of the law. Perhaps Murray isn’t taking these concerns seriously. The Darlington nurses experienced a “hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment”, but does anyone care?

The decision to snub the women may be related to events in Parliament, where the Labour benches are filled with supporters of trans activism. Almost 140 MPs from various parties have signed an early day motion tabled by a Labour MP, Nadia Whittome, demanding that guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission explaining the law on single-sex spaces “be disapproved”. This is gesture politics at its worst: the law is the law, regardless of whether MPs approve the guidance. But the fact that roughly half the signatories are Labour MPs demonstrates the grip that a thoroughly misogynist ideology still has on the party.

That has been especially true since the 2024 general election. Labour’s ranks are now full of activists rather than objective politicians who treat the notion that trans women are women as an undeniable fact. In 2022, Murray wriggled out of answering whether a biological man, Lia Thomas, should compete against women in swimming competitions in America. Murray is an ally of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has never retreated from his insistence that trans-identified men are women.

It was clear during the 2024 campaign that a Labour victory would strengthen support for trans demands within the parliamentary party. The number of MPs who are members of LGBT+ Labour — a group that lobbies for gay, lesbian and specifically trans rights — more than doubled after the election. The Labour MP Kate Osborne hosted a reception in Parliament for a trans organization, Translucent, last week.

This is the context in which Labour ministers have to operate: the law on one hand, confirmed by the Supreme Court, and colleagues in Parliament who blithely ignore it. What it means for people who work for organizations with blatantly illegal policies on single-sex spaces is disastrous. The rights of women and girls are being upheld by the courts time and again, and it’s clear they have public support. What they don’t have, however, is unequivocal support from Government ministers.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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