“Ross, can you see me now?” cried Davy Russell, the new Labour MSP for Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, in his victory speech last night. The Reform candidate, Ross Lambie, had dubbed Russell “the invisible man” because of his reluctance to appear in the customary STV by-election debates. But against the forecasts of the bookmakers and most media pundits, the plain-speaking former council worker won the most fiercely contested by-election in recent Scottish history with a majority of 602 votes.

Russell won on a 2% swing and pushed the SNP’s Katy Loudon — who had hoped to hold the Lanarkshire seat formerly held by her late colleague Christina McKelvie MSP — into second place. He had every reason to be satisfied with his success, particularly after the First Minister, John Swinney, had insisted that this by-election was a “two-horse race between the SNP and Reform”. It turned out to be a race for runner-up, and the SNP will be deeply worried that it only managed to beat Reform into second place by 800-odd votes.

“A remarkable result, absolutely delighted,” said Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, putting on a brave face and batting away questions about banning the burqa and the resignation that very day of Reform’s chairman, Zia Yusuf. He was clearly disappointed not to have come second.

But, as Professor John Curtice indicated, Reform’s 26% swing in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse was a very significant result. “The Scottish Conservatives,” said the polling guru, “have been taken for breakfast, lunch and dinner by Reform.” The Scottish Tory candidate, Richard Nelson, came fourth with 1,600 votes and was fortunate not to lose his deposit.

Reform was perhaps the victim of unrealistic expectations. And make no mistake — the party is now a political force north of the border. Reform’s vote share here was significantly higher than the 19% it has been recording in recent Holyrood opinion polls. It will likely be a significant presence in the Scottish Parliament next year.

Nigel Farage may remain an unpopular figure in Scotland, but his party has demonstrated that the disenchantment with the establishment parties that has propelled Reform south of the border also exists in Scotland. If nothing else, the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election has introduced a new word into politics: the “scunner” factor. It is an old Scots word which roughly means to be in a state of disgusted irritation. And there is no doubt that there was a lot of disgusted irritation on the streets — at least in Hamilton itself — where most of the media conducted their vox pops.

The reasons are legion: cost of living, price of heating, winter fuel payment, lack of decent jobs, shabby high streets, potholes — and even a degree of irritation about immigration, which is not an issue that normally arises on the doorsteps in Scotland. Reform picked up on that and ran with it, accusing the Scottish Labour leader of being in politics to “prioritise” the interests of the Pakistani community.

This was widely attacked by opposition parties and the media as being “blatantly racist”. Whatever the case, it was the first time anyone can remember a Scottish by-election turning explicitly on race. And significantly, playing the race card did not prevent Reform from running Labour and the SNP very close in a tight three-cornered fight.

The dog that didn’t bark was independence. There was scarcely a mention of the constitution, referendums or separatism in this contest. Nor did the victorious candidate have much to say in this campaign, having largely avoided media exposure. It has always been assumed that candidates in by-elections must participate in televised debates if they want to be taken seriously. Russell shows that this may no longer be the case. TV channels will be hoping the “invisible man” approach doesn’t catch on.

---

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.

iainmacwhirter

---

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.

---

Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

---