Conservative peer and former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine has described Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom rally as “sickening”. Speaking at the Gloucester History Festival yesterday afternoon, Heseltine said that those protesting against immigration in London “have a right to say it, but I have a right to be sickened by what they say”.

The large-scale demonstrations saw well over 100,000 people march through central London, though organizer Tommy Robinson claimed the real attendance figure was closer to three million. The Metropolitan Police said at least 25 protesters were arrested while 26 officers were injured. Labour minister Peter Kyle stressed that those responsible for violence constituted a “minority” who “should and will pay the price”, whereas the majority of those present showed that “free speech is alive and well” in the UK.

Heseltine, who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, criticized the rhetoric of Right-wing politicians such as “Trump and his voice in Britain, Farage”, who “talk about immigrants as rapists, as thieves”. The former Cabinet minister added that “there will be the odd incident by asylum seekers, yes, because human beings are human beings.” Saturday’s rally followed on from protests across Britain throughout this summer, often focused on asylum hotels. The initial demonstration took place outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, where an asylum seeker from Ethiopia was charged with sexual assault after attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl. The man, Hadush Kebatu, was convicted earlier this month.

The former deputy prime minister claimed on Sunday that “the overwhelming majority” of asylum seekers come to Britain “because they see standards of living here way beyond anything they could dream of where they are. Understandably, they want to share in that.” He added: “We may all think that we’re not well off, and that we’re getting worse off, and all of that. But to them, this is paradise on earth.”

While still a Tory MP in 2000, Heseltine said of the UK that “we have a serious problem with asylum seekers, many of whom are bogus.” He also pointed out that British citizens were “going without” housing and medical treatment to “make way for people who’ve cheated immigration rules”, and “who claim to be running away from tyrannical regimes when actually what they want to do is become part of the prosperity of our particular society”. Refugee groups criticized his “inflammatory and prejudiced” comments, while Labour ministers stated the remarks were “ill-informed”.

In a 2013 interview, Heseltine compared Nigel Farage, then-Ukip leader, to Marine Le Pen in France, describing the Eurosceptic party as “extreme”. According to the former Conservative minister, “picking up on immigration and suggesting there are simplistic solutions which no one else has thought of is an extremist position and panders to a certain section of society — in fact, it is designed to do so.” Last year, he accused Reform UK of “pandering to racism” and taking advantage of “public resentment about immigration”.

Speaking in Gloucester yesterday, Heseltine appealed to historical precedents: “The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Scots out. They built rows of castles to keep the Welsh out. The Protestants and Catholics fought each other with the most vicious cruelty.” He also cited the treatment of “Jews in the Thirties” and the language of “Enoch Powell in the Sixties”, concluding: “it’s all about that uneasy racial tension.”

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Rob Lownie is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

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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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