The media has been awash with claims that, in order to cut the ballooning welfare bill, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have set their sights on PIP (Personal Independence Payments). These help with extra living costs for people with long-term physical or mental health conditions or disabilities, and the move has been met with howls of rage from around 80 Labour MPs. Many are telling any journalist who will listen that they are willing to rebel on the issue.

There is no doubt that this is bad news for Starmer. Complaints are coming from across the party, not just the usual suspects in the hard-Left Socialist Campaign Group. Many of these potential rebels came of political age complaining about Conservative cuts, and certainly did not enter politics to enact austerity with Labour characteristics.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to rumours that the Government will U-turn, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday refusing to rule out the possibility. But tracking back would not only be embarrassing for the PM: it would undermine the rest of his legislative programme and open the door to a range of attacks from the Right .

For one thing, it would kill his internal authority. Despite talk of a recent “Ukraine bounce”, more people than not still think Starmer is doing badly as Labour leader, and over half of voters think he is incompetent. Folding to discontented backbenchers is not a way to show strong leadership or to win over the public, especially when Britons are supportive of reforming the benefits system and making payments conditional on seeking work.

It is worth remembering that although 80 potential rebels seems like a lot, the Government’s majority is over 170. So, assuming that the number of potential rebels is slightly inflated — MPs can always be bought off with a promise of a job later or some money for their pet project — then it is entirely survivable. What is the point of having a big majority if the Government can’t pass policy which is unpopular with some backbenchers? Tony Blair’s 2001-5 parliament was the most rebellious of the postwar era at the time, and yet Labour won a third term in 2005.

Successive recent Conservative governments should act as a warning here: on issues of planning, they capitulated to loud voices from the shires when it came to issues around HS2 or housebuilding, and still lost many of those seats in the 2024 election. Giving in to rebels does not work: they always come back asking for more.

The second threat to Starmer is that if his government can’t get this controversial measure through, then what happens when future contentious legislation comes forward? Allowing backbenchers to defeat controversial legislation just nine months into his term is a recipe for disaster and disunity. The Government should show no quarter, pour encourager les autres.

Third, the last thing Laboru needs going into the Runcorn and Helsby by-election is to give Reform UK ammunition for accusations of “two-tier Keir”, this time with the Government backing claimants over workers. There is already a broad sense among the public that those who work hard do not get their fair share, compared to those who do not work at all. And if Labour does lose the by-election, as one recent constituency poll suggests, alongside significant local election losses, Starmer will haemorrhage political capital. This might be his last chance to pass big, controversial legislation.

A U-turn now would be the worst of both worlds for Starmer. His government has identified a problem with the welfare system and prepared the ground for reform, which is popular with the public. By changing course, he will undermine his own authority, make future rebellions much more likely, and allow Reform UK and the Conservatives to paint him as supportive of a wasteful system. Every leader occasionally needs to face down their own party: this is where Starmer can prove his mettle.

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David Jeffery is a lecturer in British Politics at the University of Liverpool.

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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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