From its inception, Reform UK has always been acutely aware of how best to court media attention. With Nigel Farage at the helm, the party has dispensed bold manifesto promises and policy critiques at every opportunity. Yesterday’s announcement that Reform would deport 600,000 illegal immigrants during its first term in power has undoubtedly added to the momentum.

Speaking in Oxfordshire, Farage pledged to detain and deport any new arrivals via the small-boats pathway, including women and children. He also vowed to leave any international treaties that would prevent this deportation process — most pressingly, the European Convention on Human Rights — and to build immigration accommodation on military bases, as well as using British Overseas Territories as a secondary measure if necessary.

In its current form, the plan rests on two core pillars. The first is the capacity to detain and then house every illegal arrival; the second is the ability to deport these individuals at a rate that is currently unprecedented. Reform has pledged to address this lack of physical infrastructure through the use of “surplus” military bases. The aim is to provide 24,000 detention spaces, representing an increase of nearly 10 times the current detention capacity. The second part of the plan involves an even greater level of scaling, promising to remove 120,000 people per year — 30 times the current deportation level.

While this ambition is worthwhile, the trouble is that Reform will not be able to deliver on such an ambitious plan. Even in the private sector, free from Government inefficiency and bureaucracy, a project of this size would be assumed to cost tens of billions, and would be near-impossible within an 18-month timeframe.

What’s more, these policies will likely collapse on first contact with the Whitehall machine and Britain’s judges. That’s because the legal strategy underpinning the entire deportation process is untenable. Reform appears to be treating the UK’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and the repeal of the Human Rights Act as a switch that can be flipped as soon as the party is in power. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. This process would entail years of legislative battles and court challenges from political adversaries, not to mention the intense diplomatic fallout that would result from any successful withdrawal. Even denouncing the UN Convention Against Torture requires a one-year notice period, so the proposal to “disapply” other international treaties would be even more legally tenuous and time-consuming.

Reform should instead focus on the factors that can be controlled immediately, without the need for legal wrangling. For instance, tariffs could be imposed on French goods until the government takes stronger measures to prevent illegal Channel crossings. Additionally, domestic reforms are needed to eliminate the financial incentives that fuel illegal immigration, while providing immediate measures to address the issue before a major legislative overhaul can take effect.

Unfortunately, Reform is operating under the misguided belief that this can be finalized swiftly upon arrival in Number 10. In doing so, Farage is fundamentally underestimating the regulatory quagmire that has damned all recent attempts at controlling immigration. So while this new proposal will go some way towards satiating the desires of those angry at Labour’s inaction, Reform may soon find itself in the same position.

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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