Scotland Free in 2050. Free from what, one might ask — but that’s what Scotland’s embattled First Minister, John Swinney, has promised his nationalist followers. Speaking today at the Scotland 2050 conference in Edinburgh, he claimed national liberation is “within reach”. But how?

Swinney’s last big idea was to suggest that last year’s general election could constitute a “mandate” for independence talks if the Scottish National Party won a majority of seats. Apart from making no sense constitutionally, this hostage to fortune left him bereft when the SNP lost 38 seats and his Westminster group of MPs was reduced to single figures.

After that setback, the First Minister appeared to place independence very much on the back-burner. He scrapped his predecessor Humza Yousaf’s post of Minister for Independence and called on his cabinet to build the case for self-government by demonstrating competence in office.

Fortune held that hostage just long enough to demonstrate the SNP administration’s failure across the range of devolved competences. One in seven Scots are now languishing on NHS waiting lists. Health service performance has been worse than south of the border despite more being spent. Education standards are in decline, and the attainment gap between rich and poor students is as wide as ever. Drug deaths, already occurring at three times the rate in England, continue to rise. Public procurement scandals, such as the ferry fiasco, have wrecked any idea that the SNP government is managerially competent.

Speaking today, Swinney said: “I have long believed that Scotland is an afterthought to successive UK governments. Scotland is not on Westminster’s radar in the same way, say, as London, the Midlands or the South East.” But this is disingenuous. Most of the Scottish spending premium is only possible because of fiscal transfers from the UK via the Barnett Formula. Only last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that Holyrood would receive an additional £2.9 billion per year, taking the total to £52 billion a year by 2029.

Yet Swinney says that “only independence can free Scotland from a broken system and a failing economic model.” If anything has been broken, it is surely the SNP’s reckless spending model, which is unsustainable according to successive reports from Audit Scotland.

The finances of the Scottish administration are in a parlous state, according to the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the independent Fraser of Allander Institute, thanks to the SNP spending billions more than it can afford on welfare and public-sector salaries. Swinney has congratulated himself on paying public-sector workers 5% higher wages than in England. That may go down well with grandees attending the Scotland 2050 conference, but middle-income Scots — who now pay higher income tax for poorer services — are less enamoured with his generosity.

Swinney has been under intense pressure from a discontented party for failing to deliver a credible route to independence, and there has been much talk of an imminent leadership challenge. The recent loss of a relatively safe SNP seat in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election was a shock for which the party should have been prepared. Reform UK has been increasing in popularity across Scotland, and support for the SNP in opinion polls has been as low as 32% recently, far below the level required to secure victory in next year’s Scottish Parliament elections.

On Monday, Swinney promised to address the fiscal crisis of the Scottish state by relying on digital technology. Perhaps he should just bring in ChatGPT and let artificial intelligence work out a route map for national liberation. The First Minister certainly needs some intelligent advice.

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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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