It is easy for the Right to get excited about Keir Starmer’s waning popularity, but the real beneficiaries of the Prime Minister’s troubles might be those to his political left. Part of the story of the 2024 election was Labour struggling against smaller parties in seats it should have won by large margins. With a new report suggesting that this could be a permanent challenge, there’s a real chance Starmer’s struggles could empower the Left next time around.

Polling from Compass has found that nearly twice as many 2024 Labour voters could see themselves switching to the Left rather than the Right. Around half of those who opted for Starmer’s party in the summer said they could drift to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens next time. With Labour holding a large but thinly spread majority, this could be hugely challenging to its chances of a second election victory. Dozens of the party’s seats are vulnerable to its share of the vote, whichever direction it goes.

There was already a sense of this in July. In lots of seats, Labour majorities collapsed despite the party’s overall success. In safe seats, voters surged towards challengers on the Left. The Greens picked up a few seats of their own but also came second in nearly 40, setting the stage for a real fight on the Left next time. In the cities, independents running on pro-Gaza platforms were another challenge to Labour incumbents, breaking the stronghold that the party had enjoyed in those areas. If this momentum continues, it could cause real trouble for the party.

This summer, Starmer benefited from an overwhelming public anger directed at the Tories. Loyal Conservatives stayed home, while others split to Reform; meanwhile, voters on the Left swung behind Labour to get the Tories out. If any of these dimensions change, the result could look very different. If Labour starts to lose votes to the Left, there are two vulnerabilities — more seats outright flipping to the Greens, Lib Dems or others, or the Left vote splitting and allowing the Tories or Reform to emerge through the middle.

There’s a political sense to this, too. For many on the Left, Starmer’s government already appears hugely unambitious. He and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have largely chosen a pragmatic path: though there have been spending and tax rises, they are not on the scale many of the Left would demand. If Labour fails to make a mark on public services, there could be real calls by 2029 to go further and spend more to plug gaps in the NHS and other parts of the state. Starmer’s caution could easily prompt more economic populism on the Left.

Over the next few years, local contests could form a real proving ground for this. In cities, in particular, there has been little in the way of a challenge to years of Labour dominance. In some councils, Greens and independents are already picking up seats. Should Labour slump, these contests could become interesting, with insurgent parties claiming local authorities or even targeting the major mayoral contests. There’s a chance that 2024 was the start of a noticeably more multipolar politics, with both the Left and the Right beginning to fracture.

First-past-the-post has inured Britons to a largely binary system, according to which one party surges while the other falters. Voter behavior is pulling away from this now, though, with both Left- and Right-wing voters having more options and more willingness to choose them. In the summer, anti-Tory sentiment was enough to turn this to Labour’s advantage, winning a broad but shallow majority. Next time, the dynamic might work in a mirror image, with Starmer losing ground to both Left and Right. Should that happen, it could lead to a chaotic — and total — realignment in British politics.

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John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator. His Substack is Joxley Writes.

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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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