It has long been an article of faith on the nationalist Left that the Scots are immune to the politics of the “far-Right”. However, bien pensant Scots have had to confront the uncongenial reality that Nigel Farage’s party is undergoing a remarkable rise north of the border. It is now edging ahead of the Scottish Conservatives in recent polls, despite having had little organization on the ground before the general election.

Now Nigel Farage is coming north next month to rub their faces in it. His expected appearance in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, caused by the death of the SNP MSP Christina McKelvie, will be his first visit since 2019.

Scotland has not exactly been a welcoming place for Farage in the past. In 2013, he was famously besieged by independence supporters in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and had to seek refuge in a pub until he was rescued by police. Protesters called the then UKIP leader “racist scum”. Well, if that is indeed what he is, there now seems to be rather a lot of racist sympathizers in Scotland.

In the latest Survation poll, Reform is at 17% of the constituency vote, enough to deliver up to 19 seats in the 2026 Holyrood elections — five more than the Tories. It could just conceivably hold the balance of power, since the SNP is expected to fall short of an absolute majority.

That is a prospect that horrifies “civic” Scotland. How can this be, they wonder, when immigration hasn’t been a major issue in Scotland? Although there are now some rumblings from council leaders that Glasgow can’t cope with the number of asylum seekers in the city, Scotland is 95% white, there are relatively few ethnic minorities living in isolated communities and there have been no major grooming gang scandals like those seen in England. The SNP government has also been calling for relaxed visa rules so that more migrants can come to work here.

But Scotland’s supposed hatred of the Right has always been a myth. Scots vote SNP largely because it is the patriotic thing to do — not because of its support for transgender ideology, mass immigration, and Net Zero. A million Scots voted for Brexit in 2016. Most think that it is a mistake to shut down the North Sea oil and gas industry. They opposed Nicola Sturgeon’s gender bill by a margin of two to one.

Above all, it is the cost of living crisis — plus the sense that nothing works — that is attracting Scottish voters to Reform. Scots are not immune to national populism; indeed, the Scottish National Party used to be the very image of a cultural nationalist party until Alex Salmond turned it Left in the Nineties. Before he became leader, it opposed membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), demanded “Scotland’s Oil” wealth and had little interest in identity politics, unless it was Scottish identity.

In 1967, Hamilton was the scene of the SNP’s great electoral breakthrough when Winnie Ewing won a Westminster by-election. Reform is not going to repeat that success. But the mere presence of a grinning Nigel Farage will raise nationalist hackles. The First Minister, John Swinney, has called for all parties in Scotland to unite against the far-Right. The Reform UK leader will no doubt insist that the anti-English SNP are the racists, not him.

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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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