It’s hard to believe so many politicians are incapable of thinking for themselves. It doesn’t matter which party they belong to: the influence of gender ideology is as pervasive as ever. Some MPs even appear to have been unaware of the law and are shocked to discover, following the Supreme Court judgment earlier this year on the meaning of the word “sex”, that women-only spaces have legal protection.

A number of Labour MPs have challenged the ruling, apparently believing — or affecting to believe — that the Supreme Court is some kind of advisory body instead of the highest court in the land. Josh Newbury, MP for Cannock Chase, says it is “clear” to him that “trans women are women and trans men are men.” He denies that the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise, claiming that the judgment has been misinterpreted and “wrongly brought this into question”.

Even Reform UK, which has tried to position itself as a refuge for voters who are fed up with the trans-obsessed rhetoric of other parties, can’t keep its recruits on-message. A former prison governor, Vanessa Frake, had barely been announced as the party’s new justice advisor when she declared that trans women should not be barred from women’s prisons. Her argument, which is unusual to say the least, seems to be that some female prisoners are horrible people, so it makes no sense to exclude trans-identified males.

“There are equally vile women as there possibly are trans women, so it’s all about the risk assessments for me,” Frake told the Times. This is missing the point on a grand scale, as though women-only spaces are a reward for “nice” women rather than a principle which applies equally to everyone. It’s also an embarrassment for Nigel Farage, who has previously denounced “transgender indoctrination” in the UK.

For Women Scotland, the organisation which brought the Supreme Court case, was quick to challenge Farage about Frake’s remarks, asking whether “putting vulnerable women at risk” would be in the Reform manifesto. But what can’t be denied is the extent to which trans ideology is entrenched among activists of all parties. It’s not always easy to know whether MPs really believe what they’re saying, or whether they’re scared of a pile-on if they don’t go along with the orthodoxy. But the extent of the capture is causing alarm among dissidents in every party.

The Labour Women’s Declaration has described Labour MPs’ “scaremongering” about the Supreme Court ruling as “disappointing and deeply concerning”. In an article for the Telegraph at the weekend, former Green deputy leader Shahrar Ali lamented the “ideological insanity” of his party, pointing out that not one candidate for the upcoming leadership and deputy leadership contests is openly gender-critical.

In the three and a half months since the Supreme Court ruling, it has become apparent that many politicians and activists are simply refusing to accept it. They’ve misinterpreted the judgment, pretending that it’s either changed the law in this country or is merely just an opinion. Clearly, it’s not enough for party leaders to grit their teeth and say they accept the ruling. They need to put an end to all the excuses and face down the reality-deniers in their parties. Women are half the population, and we deserve better.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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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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