Gender ideology continues to be the spectre that is haunting Scottish politics. The Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife tribunal has brought home the impossibility of reconciling women’s right to single-sex spaces with the “right” of men who identify as women to use such spaces. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has made sensible noises in the last week about unequivocally backing Peggie and admitting it was a mistake for his party to vote in favor of the Gender Recognition Reform bill in 2022. First Minister John Swinney, however, has opted for ideological cakeism.

During a press conference this week, when asked to clarify if he believed a trans woman was a woman, he replied: “I accept that to be the case”. This came after an exasperated, blustering performance during last week’s First Minister’s Questions where, in response to Conservative leader Russell Findlay’s grilling, he waffled on about abiding by the Equality Act. He then threw in a jibe about the subject “sowing division in our society” to much jeering in the chamber.

Given the humiliating media coverage that has followed, it might seem mystifying that Swinney is so steadfastly committed to having his party die on this hill. The most obvious answer is that he fears a SNP membership mutiny similar to the one his Labour counterpart faced. Sarwar has tried to appease ideologues in Scottish Labour by saying he regretted not pushing harder for amendments during the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill vote. Yet, his U-turn on gender reforms elicited predictable accusations of “betrayal” to trans-identifying individuals in the party. To make matters worse, a motion backed by Sarwar to protect single-sex spaces in Scottish schools was recently voted down at the party’s conference in Glasgow. In attempting a similar rollback, the SNP leader wouldn’t just be angering the trans allies in his membership, but Nicola Sturgeon loyalists who would deem it treasonous.

Swinney is also looking over his shoulder. Reform UK is gaining significant traction in Scotland. It’s predicted the party could win up to 15 seats in the 2026 Holyrood election, more than both the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Greens. In the recent local council elections, Reform received more votes than the Greens, Alba and every other fringe party combined. This is rattling Swinney’s cage, so much so that he’s called for cross-party efforts to “lock them out”. “I don’t in any way try to say that there isn’t anger in our society,” he said on Wednesday. “I think what worries me is that some of the response to that anger is to find attractiveness in the politics of Farage, of the far-Right, and I think that’s the wrong choice.”

Reform will likely poach voters in Scotland who previously put faith in the independence movement for the same reason: a thirst for radical change. In abiding by the gender doctrine, Swinney is positioning the SNP as avowedly “progressive”, the safest choice for anti-Reform voters. But it was the Isla Bryson case — as well as Operation Branchform — that brought down Sturgeon, and skepticism over transgender rights and gender reforms has increased across the board. The First Minister is currently prioritizing the hard-Left in his party over the electorate.

But Swinney may be doubling down on trans ideology because, ultimately, he’s given up. He reluctantly stepped up as leader with little enthusiasm after Humza Yousaf resigned to prevent social conservative Kate Forbes nabbing the top job. Even though the SNP is expected to win the next Holyrood election, the independence movement has indefinitely stagnated and almost two-thirds of the electorate disapprove of its governance.

Proposing an almost German-style firewall from “those of us who are repulsed by the politics of Farage”, the First Minister urged those who agree with him to “work together, for decency, democracy and respect”. And yet, there is still no “decency” or “respect” for Scotland’s women.

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Nina Welsch is a writer and former librarian.

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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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