Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham has given his first major speech since returning to Parliament, seeking to lay out his vision for Britain. At the heart of the speech was a plea for a different political culture led by devolution to overturn the “broken” Westminster system. Yet, in many ways, Burnham’s speech was just another example of the small-mindedness of Westminster politics. Giving the illusion of action without actually doing anything at all, his solutions obsess over the structures and process of political decision-making, rather than the substance.

The crescendo of the speech was a plea to address the shocking findings of Alan Milburn’s review into youth employment, which warns that the UK could see another quarter of a million young people out of work, education or training within five years. “Blame us, not them,” Burnham said today. He is right that blame lies with the political class, which has overseen the deindustrialization of Britain and forged an economy increasingly dependent on low-end service jobs that are low-productivity and lack decent career progression. But what is his solution?

In classic Westminster fashion, the answer is to shift responsibility to mayors and reform the “fragmentation” of the current provision of employment support. These proposals are not without merit. A more localized delivery model may help schemes to engage parts of the community that a traditional Jobcenter approach cannot. However, it does not address Britain’s 20-year economic failure to create decent, well-paid jobs across every part of the country.

Look across the Channel to Germany: youth unemployment has been lower there in recent years because of an active industrial policy backed by consistent investment. However, like Britain, Germany is suffering from the existential threat of Chinese production that has seen nearly 350,000 industrial jobs lost since the pandemic. Youth unemployment is now rising again, up from 6.9% in 2023 to 7.2% in April 2026. At the same time Burnham’s speech was being written, Volkswagen announced that up to 100,000 jobs could be cut from its global workforce, due to the pressure of US tariffs and Chinese competition. It remains to be seen how shifting the pieces on the board of Britain’s political system could alter these factors.

It is unclear, too, whether Burnham’s No.10 North proposal is a genuine attempt to devolve power from London or whether it will become another Darlington Economic Campus, a good press release but nothing more. Burnham’s first speech indicates that he is a master of the Westminster game, but the public are becoming better than ever at spotting a politician’s sleight of hand. No one will be thanking the new government for locating more civil servants in Manchester if industries are closing down.

Burnham still has time to level with voters about the scale of the challenge Britain faces and outline the trade-offs, particularly the need for more household saving and greater collective investment, to deal with Chinese industrial dominance. If he does not, then, like Starmer, he will find himself a prisoner of events and unable to connect with a public who can see the gathering economic storm. Burnham knows how that story ends.

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Andrew O’Brien is the former Director of Policy at the think tank Demos and currently Head of Secretariat of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods. He writes in a personal capacity.

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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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