According to new comments from Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, forces have “adopted the language of activism” to ward off accusations of racism. Watson has shown political nous by acknowledging concerns around officers’ partiality, while denying that two-tier policing exists.

The timing and the tone of this intervention are significant. Watson was appointed to his current role by Andy Burnham, and has been tipped as a future head of the Metropolitan Police. In his words can be found clues about Burnhamite, “soft Left” views on law-and-order policy. Indeed, there’s a distinctly New Labourish spin to Watson’s comments, which represent a classic example of triangulation. The contents of Police Race Action Plans, for example, he sells as “guidance” rather than policy, law or procedure. Much like the problems encountered over trans guidance for public bathrooms, the Labour Party has an unfortunate tendency to obfuscate, offering a nudge and a wink to special interest groups despite decisions made by the courts.

Of course, Watson knows this full well, but can’t admit it. Far from policing being “two-tier”, in reality forces operate more tiers than an Aztec ziggurat. This is due to the ghosts inside the machine — the second-order effects around race emanating from management decisions and attitudes. Officers are entirely aware of the progressive dog whistles blown from headquarters. Ambitious police managers, knowing advancement relies on kowtowing to fashionable politics, have reputations for throwing officers under buses over matters of race.

It’s unsurprising that even Watson has chosen not to acknowledge this reality. Joining the police in 1988, he has survived and prospered among the cohort of progressive technocrat chiefs who now run British policing. Did he box clever to survive, like a Resistance fighter under occupation? In any case, he is now a media darling — a bluff, avuncular Northern chief constable in the John Stevens mould.

Which brings us to Burnham, who cut his teeth at the Home Office between 2005 and 2006. He served under David Blunkett, a Northern politician with a common touch who had little truck with hand-wringing Left-wingers. Burnham, who knew what kind of copper Watson was when he appointed him, perhaps demonstrates his understanding of another Labour weakness: the party’s almost romantic animus against the police, one casting them as Thatcherite stormtroopers of the Miners’ Strike and Hillsborough. This provides yet another ghost in the haunted house of British policing, along with the Home Office’s pathological desire for control. It will be instructive to see how a Burnham government reacts to the police reform White Paper currently being navigated through Parliament by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Meanwhile, a no-nonsense copper such as Watson carries appeal for Red Wall voters. Who better to address growing concerns over two-tier policing, especially among those tempted by Reform UK? His media statements are occasionally dismissive of modern policing’s knee-taking, rainbow-lanyard-wearing tendency. This, to his credit, isn’t completely cosmetic: officers inside the force confirm that GMP’s internal culture appears less doctrinaire than other English forces.

Policing’s problems are too complex for any single chief constable to solve, or indeed any prime minister. Yet Watson’s intervention is smart politics. Perhaps we’ve just been offered a clue as to the direction Burnham might take on the two-tier policing controversy. Whether such a classically Blairite piece of triangulation will steady the law-and-order ship for Labour remains to be seen. The party’s backbenchers can be unruly, as they were with welfare reform last year. Burnham will need more than slick PR and a solid taste in chief constables to rein in Labour’s seemingly insatiable appetite for identity-fixated politics.

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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