With an election only nine months away, the once-mighty Scottish National Party is facing hard times. The loss of some 8,500 dues-paying members since 2023 has left First Minister John Swinney struggling for funds to finance next year’s Holyrood campaign. The latest accounts show a deficit of £455,000 for 2024.

The party’s infamous campervan, seized by police as part of Operation Branchform, has lost nearly £60,000 in depreciation alone. It had been left in the driveway of the mother of former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband, who faces a charge of embezzlement.

But cash is only part of Swinney’s summer of discontent. Sturgeon’s salty memoirs, Frankly, have been poorly received, not just by critics but by many Scottish nationalists. In stating that male rapists forfeit the right to choose their gender, in reference to the Isla Bryson case, the former first minister has reignited the trans controversy just as her party was moving on from its disastrous role in the gender wars.

Morale in the SNP has sunk as the party struggles to contain an opinion poll slide. The latest Ipsos/STV poll has the nationalists at 31% — a far cry from the 44% they were recording before Sturgeon resigned in February 2023. Swinney is now facing a grassroots revolt at the party conference in October over his failure to deliver a credible route to independence.

The late Alex Salmond’s breakaway Alba Party ,however, is not posing much of a threat. Instead, two newcomers to Scottish politics look likely to shred the SNP vote next year. Reform UK and Jeremy Corbyn’s new Left-wing party could not be more different ideologically, but they are both bad news for the nationalists.

Reform is expected to secure around a dozen MSPs in Holyrood next May, to the dismay of the Scottish Left. Over a million Scots voted for Brexit in 2016, many of them SNP supporters, so Nigel Farage’s party always had a potential electoral base among disillusioned nationalists. In June, Reform came within six percentage points of winning the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election.

Meanwhile, Corbyn’s party is likely to attract many Left-wing nationalist voters who regard Swinney as too conservative by. The former Labour leader has already been addressing picket lines in Glasgow and promising a second independence referendum. Also nibbling away at the SNP vote is the Scottish Green Party, which is promising to win 16 seats next May.

Ironically, Scottish Labour — which only a year ago was on course to replace the SNP — is experiencing much the same electoral misfortunes as the nationalists. Leader Anas Sarwar has been on the back foot over the UK party’s policies on everything from the winter fuel payment to Palestine. And things aren’t going to get better, with food price inflation rising by 5% from last year.

Scottish politics is fragmenting in extraordinary ways. The proliferation of parties makes the results of next year’s elections almost impossible to call. But that very fragmentation could, if the cards fall in the right way, allow Swinney to scrape back into Bute House despite the collapse in the nationalist vote. At least, that is what he hopes: that the losers could win again.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

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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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