It’s always awkward for a Labour politician when they gain fans on the Right. That’s one reason why Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is the least popular Cabinet minister with Labour Party members. But could the introduction of a scheme to bring tens of thousands of asylum seekers to the UK change the way that both sides think about her?

According to The Times, the new policy is “similar” to the Homes for Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme in which British citizens volunteer to provide rent-free accommodation for displaced Ukrainian nationals. The guests receive a visa and support services and the hosts get £350 per month by way of thanks.

Of course, that was a response to a one-off emergency. Expanding the approach to asylum seekers from every part of the world indefinitely would transform asylum policy. Indeed, Britain would move pretty close to the liberal immigration regime advocated by the Fabian Society in its 2023 report, Lawful and Fair. So, having built her image as a hardliner on immigration and the most socially conservative member of the Cabinet, what on earth is Mahmood playing at?

The short answer is politics — specifically, the internal machinations of the Labour Party. In 2025, Keir Starmer promoted her to the Home Office to get a grip on immigration. However, he’ll soon be gone and he and Mahmood have fallen out over an alleged breach of the Ministerial Code by immigration minister Mike Tapp. There’s also talk of Starmer’s likely successor Andy Burnham diluting her most controversial reforms — especially on restricting Indefinite Leave to Remain. And so, with a comprehensive reshuffle on the way, a sop to the party’s immigration liberals may be the best way of keeping her current job.

But how does Mahmood reconcile such a maneuver with her personal brand — and, more significantly, Burnham’s mission to win back voters from Reform UK? She will argue that the new policy isn’t about expanding the asylum system but improving it. In particular, the sponsorship aspect is about securing community buy-in to the settling of refugees. The second point in her case would be that Homes for Ukraine, which has helped 200,000 refugees, is a successful proof of concept. Thirdly, she would insist that providing “safe and legal” routes for asylum seekers is essential to solving the small boats problem.

However, the Government’s case risks falling apart on all these points. Communities won’t be won over if only the immigration enthusiasts are empowered. That’s especially true if overseas sources of funding are allowed to flow into the scheme, which would make a mockery of the language around localism.

As for the Homes for Ukraine precedent, anti-immigration voices will point to evidence showing major disparities in criminality between immigrants from different countries. At the very least, skeptics will demand full transparency on the success, or otherwise, of integration. The current Home Office approach, which obfuscates country-of-origin information, is incompatible with building trust.

One also has to doubt whether the new policy will solve the small boats crisis. The main point of a sponsorship scheme is to focus help on the most vulnerable individuals — in other words, not the young male economic migrants who overwhelmingly keep the people smugglers in business. Those who see safe and legal routes as the solution should be reminded that the unprecedented Boriswave of legal immigration did not stop illegal immigration into the UK. As is the case with drugs, prostitution and other social issues, we should not assume that state-regulated programs automatically displace criminal activity.

The shame here is that Mahmood has learned nothing from Starmer’s failure. Seeking to reach out to the Left from a moderate position never works. You just earn the contempt of the former while losing the trust of the latter.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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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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