Police officers who actively participate in Pride marches are breaking the law, according to a landmark judgment in the High Court. In a decision that’s likely to have a profound effect on how chief constables behave in future, Mr Justice Linden today ruled that the sight of uniformed officers marching, displaying the Progress flag and turning up in official vehicles painted in Pride colours breaches their duty of impartiality.

The defendant in the case was Vanessa Jardine, chief constable of Northumbria Police, who joined the Newcastle Pride in the City 2024 march with her officers in July last year. The judge said that Jardine’s decision to participate was “irrational”, pointing out that every police officer swears an oath to behave with “integrity, diligence and impartiality”.

It’s hard to imagine why Jardine ever thought such behaviour was impartial, but then she leads on LGBTQ+ matters for the National Police Chiefs Council and long ago crossed the line into advocacy. Astonishingly, part of her defence was that her participation in the march was “necessary and justified”. The judge responded that Jardine had misunderstood the nature of the public-sector equality duty.

The ruling was expedited so it could be handed down before this year’s march, which is scheduled to take place this weekend. According to the judgment, Jardine has already stated she will attend, although she has not said whether she will wear her uniform.

The case was brought by Linzi Smith, a football fan who was investigated by the police after the club she supports, Newcastle United, reported several of her social media posts to the force. Three months ago, Northumbria Police apologised to Smith for subjecting her to a two-hour grilling in the course of a “hate crime” investigation. Smith argued that the chief constable’s participation in last year’s Pride march called into question the force’s ability to deal fairly with someone like herself, who holds gender-critical views.

Linden agreed. “It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which the officers in question might be called on to deal with a clash between gender critical people and supporters of gender ideology, and therefore situations where the former had cause for concern as to whether they were being dealt with impartially,” he wrote in a crucial passage.

He added: “There might be an attempted counter demonstration by gender critical people which required the police to deal with it […] In all of these cases, the fact that the officers had publicly stated their support for transgender rights by taking part in the 2024 March would be likely to give the impression that they may not deal with the matter fairly and impartially.”

It’s an apprehension shared by the wider public, who are at odds with the trans-activist stance of many police forces. Ordinary people are aghast when police press offices issue notices in which violent male offenders are described as women, even when the accompanying photograph shows a dishevelled man in desperate need of a shave.

It’s a scandal of epic proportions that so many senior police officers have embraced gender ideology. They have fallen for the lie that giving special rights to trans people, at the expense of everyone else, is a neutral and apolitical act. Today’s judgment has stripped away that excuse, exposing the spectacle of cops waving Progress flags as a declaration of blatant bias.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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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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