Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock mounted a defense of Keir Starmer this week, saying it is “not too late” for the Prime Minister to turn his fortunes around.

Speaking at an event at the UnHerd Club, Kinnock urged Starmer to show greater confidence in his leadership. “He’s got the kit; all he’s got to do is believe in himself enough to get on with it,” Kinnock said. “I just wish he would, because he’s a very fine guy.”

Despite his frustrations, the former Labour leader defended Starmer’s record in government. “He hasn’t screwed it up, and he’s done a hell of a lot of good things that have largely gone unnoticed,” Kinnock said. Those achievements, he argued, had been overshadowed by “absurd cock-ups” such as the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance — a decision he described as “utterly unnecessary and, politically, seriously bruising”.

Other senior Labour figures have lambasted Starmer’s record in government, including former health secretary Wes Streeting, who resigned last month after citing Starmer’s lack of “vision” for the country. He has also expressed his intent to challenge for the party leadership.

It’s not the first time that Kinnock has expressed concern about this Labour government. In July 2025, he stated that the party was “bogged down by their own imposed limitations”, and suffered from a “lack of narrative”. In October, he said that Starmer had months, not years, to turn around the party’s fortunes, adding that he had “reservations about the capability” of some of the PM’s closest aides in Downing Street.

Pressure on Starmer and the Labour government has intensified in recent months. The party continues to trail Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in national polling and lost more than 1,400 council seats in May’s local elections. According to Electoral Calculus, Reform is currently polling at around 27%, compared with Labour’s 18.8%.

Kinnock criticized both Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe, suggesting that neither was “committed to the thoroughness and integrity of representation that I think should be basic credentials of democratic politicians, whatever their political branding”.

He also accused Reform of offering “superficial, uncosted promises” based on a simple calculation of “what would you like us to say? Fine, we’ll say that”. He added: “That’s the nature of populism.” Such movements, Kinnock claimed, were capitalizing on a widespread sense of alienation, allowing “a Right-wing bunch of ex-public schoolboys” to present themselves as “proletarian plutocrats”.

Kinnock argued that populist movements thrive by channeling public frustration into resentment against perceived outsiders. “Of course, they don’t stop at generating economic and cultural grievance,” he said. “They cannot resist the temptation not only of sowing and harvesting that grievance, but of finding someone to blame. Classically, the blame is put upon others — Muslims, Jews, black people, white people, the working class, middle-class intellectuals.”

Despite Labour’s dire polling and Reform’s ascent, Kinnock insisted that Starmer still has time to regain the initiative. “It’s not too late,” he said. “It could be done this weekend by Keir, who is a man of high intelligence, rooted principles and a renowned advocate.”

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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