Jürgen Habermas, the titanic German intellectual who died earlier this year, extolled the “public sphere” and lamented its decline. Today, we are a long way from his idealized paradigm, the Georgian coffee house, where citizens come together to discuss public matters through reasoned debate. The public sphere was finished, Habermas thought when he died, reduced to ashes, above all, by social media. Had he lived a few more months, however, he might have seen some of its embers flicker still. With the publication of Nigel Farage’s Substack on Sunday, it’s becoming increasingly clear that politicians want to revive a sense that Britain can have in-depth discussions once again.

We may have Tony Blair to thank in the first place. With his 5,700-word missive last month on the state of the Labour Party, he revived that venerable tradition of British public life: the pamphlet war. Blair received several responses, the best one from the pen of the Prime Minister — demonstrating the case, however limply, for him carrying on. Ed Davey, for his part, made a cheap gag about “drone warfare”. Well, nobody was asking for his essay, anyway.

Which brings us to its latest participant, Nigel Farage. His contribution, like the two prime ministers’, is not to be found in the broadsheets. Blair stuck his essay on the Tony Blair Institute website, and X, while Starmer and Farage opted for their personal Substacks. The new media allows them to reach a mass audience. Farage makes this selling point explicit. His essays — he plans to publish one a month — will “not be edited by anyone else, and they will not be misconstrued by parts of the mainstream media”. We will get the message straight from the horse’s mouth.

Farage’s first essay, written in the aftermath of the Henry Nowak case, is devoted to two-tier policing and the anti-white discrimination enshrined in EDI policies. Among its virtues is that it is human-written. It’s unfortunate that these things now need saying, but they do. Al Carns, apparently angling for his own leadership bid, has busily been publishing, if not essays, lengthy tweets. Many of them are AI-written, according to AI detection software — including, ironically, his post about AI. “This isn’t an AI story. It’s the story of every industry we used to lead.” It hardly inspires confidence in his capacity for serious thought.

Meanwhile, Farage’s essay is a good piece of work. It supports its case with well-founded evidence. It cuts against his image as a populist demagogue. One is reminded of his interview with Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain a few months ago, where she seemed baffled that he was reading about the People’s Budget of 1909. If he is a populist demagogue, then he is not an unthinking one.

The essay by Farage deals in pure, cold facts. Its most powerful segment simply narrates the Nowak case. The facts are damning enough. By dealing in such facts, he is apparently guilty of something called “weaponization”; but it is hardly his fault that the unvarnished story so thoroughly supports his argument.

There is an appetite in Britain, chronically underestimated by the BBC, for sustained, rational discussion. People want an energetic public sphere. Compare Farage with Streeting, Burnham, or Carns, and it becomes clear which side has a substantive vision to offer. Labour’s next prime minister would be wise to take a leaf from Blair’s book.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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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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