The year following his tribunate, Gaius Gracchus’s political enemies seized upon the unrest as a pretext to declare martial law and move against his supporters, ultimately resulting in his death. Besieged on the Aventine Hill, his last words were reportedly the wretched lament of “Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn?”

It’s a question Kemi Badenoch must have asked herself. Her electoral prospects look slim: the Red Wall is shaping up as a Reform–Labour battleground, she has barely a foothold in Scotland, is under siege from the Lib Dems in affluent commuter towns, and faces a Reform challenge almost everywhere else.

However, a new report may offer her a way forward. Published by the Conservatives Together pressure group and titled “Rebuilding the Rural Vote”, the report urges the Tory PM to concentrate on securing and holding 70 key rural seats.

Endorsed by Grant Shapps, the report criticises the party for relying on “assumptions of inherited loyalty” and putting in “minimal effort” to maintain support in these areas. It attributes the party’s recent losses to its neglect of “less traditional” rural concerns, including housing affordability, environmental issues, and the selection of non-local candidates. In an op-ed, Shapps highlights the report’s recommendations of “the lack of modern campaigning techniques and the selection of non-local candidates”.

The slide of rural seats away from the Conservatives has been evident since 2019. Since Brexit and the shift to new agricultural and trade policies, around 8,000 farming businesses have shut down — a decline of over 5%, bringing the total to 141,000. This is compounded by concerns over Britain’s free-trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand, which will progressively open the UK market to increased imports of beef and sheep meat.

This erosion of rural support has begun to reshape the political map. Last year, the unthinkable happened: Labour surged ahead across a number of rural constituencies, and internal Green Party polling even predicted — correctly — that they could wrest two such seats from the Conservatives.

The shires are the heartland of the Tory Party. But at the last election, they were reduced to just 83 rural seats, compared to Labour’s 114, with the real winners proving to be the Liberal Democrats, who won 44. With his party’s success in the shires replicated at the last set of local elections, Ed Davey said the results showed the Lib Dems were now “the party of Middle England”.

The Tory Party retains rural strongholds in Yorkshire and the Humber and the South West. But even these may not be safe — both East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire turned turquoise at the last set of local elections. Polling by More in Common found high levels of concern for climate change, and strong support for the Net Zero target, with over half supporting new onshore wind and solar farms being built in their local area. Given that Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans will see huge swathes of Britain’s green and pleasant land turned over to green energy, that commitment is about to be sorely tested.

To retreat into the Blue Hedge may offer a temporary sanctuary, but it is no strategy for revival — only for survival. The Conservatives could hunker down in their remaining rural bastions, relying on cultural affinity and decades-old loyalties, but that would be a slow march into political irrelevance. The report’s recommendations — from fast-tracking local candidate selections to doubling down on hyper-local campaigning — risk accelerating the shift, recasting the party as little more than a regional outfit clinging to its last patches of safe turf. Without a broader, future-facing offer that resonates beyond the hedge, the party would be conceding the national stage to its rivals.

For the Conservatives to retreat into a narrower, rural base would mark a fundamental shift in the party’s function within British democracy. A party that once sought to be a national force would drift toward geographic — and therefore ideological — isolation, no longer aggregating the will of the nation but merely echoing the anxieties of its most loyal enclaves. Instead of acting as a bridge between governed and governors, it would become a feedback loop of ever-narrower concerns, ceding the national stage to those better able to reflect and respond to the complexities of the electorate. Just as Gaius Gracchus found himself encircled, lamenting his isolation on the Aventine, the Conservative Party risks becoming a stranded remnant in the political wilderness.

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Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot.

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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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