Having once been the party’s pet issue, Net Zero has become increasingly awkward for the Conservatives. It was Theresa May’s government which passed the laws enshrining it as a target for the UK, while Boris Johnson put it at the centre of his manifesto. With Reform UK on the rise, however, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has explicitly distanced herself and her party from the policy. Now, her former leadership opponent James Cleverly is challenging her on that stance, accusing Net Zero sceptics of being “neo-Luddites” and arguing that there needn’t be a choice between cutting emissions and boosting the economy. He may well be right.

There is certainly a strain on the British Right that opposes measures to combat climate change. However, these voters already have a full-throated option in Nigel Farage, who has made clear his opposition to Net Zero, enthusiasm for new oil and gas extraction, and antipathy towards solar panels and air pumps. The Tories will struggle to win over this group considering their record of championing environmentalism within government.

On the other hand, the Tories have plenty to lose. The majority of voters, including most Conservatives, are convinced of the reality of climate change and the need to take action. Net Zero itself enjoys widespread support (though voters are more sceptical when informed of its specific costs). Opposing the policy imposes a ceiling on a party’s support — which could prove especially costly if you are not winning over the more climate-sceptic voters anyway.

The Tories have particular reasons to be careful here. There has always been a conservationist tendency within the party and its supporters. It was this faction, embraced by the likes of Zac Goldsmith and David Cameron, which pushed the Tories to put decarbonisation at the centre of their message through 14 years in government. The Conservative turn against Net Zero has contributed to the loss of previously safe seats, such as Waveney and Hereford, to the Green Party. If this trend continues, it could hurt the Tories in the few remaining rural seats where they seem strong.

There is a greater challenge here, too. Both Net Zero and the wider push against climate change are now firmly established as mainstream opinions. Going against them puts you in opposition to a broad base of support. For Reform, an inherently iconoclastic party, this works. Nigel Farage’s base prides itself on rejecting establishment positions. For the Conservatives, it’s not clear that the same is true; indeed, the Tory route back to power rests on keeping and winning more moderate voters who don’t want to turn to Reform. The further they move from mainstream opinion in order to chase Farage, the harder this becomes.

This whole debate is an example of the bigger challenge facing the Conservative Party. It needs to win back votes from Reform, but it is unclear whether it can do that simply by copying the insurgent party’s policies. The message that “Reform is right, but trust us to do it” doesn’t cut through. Reform voters look at the Conservatives’ record and don’t trust them, while more moderate voters are put off by what they view as denial of climate reality.

Cleverly’s intervention goes beyond Net Zero. It is a challenge to the Conservatives to actually present an offering that differentiates them from Reform and takes the fight to Farage. The former home secretary’s idea of promoting a future-focused, enterprising approach to climate change could be a positive one. It could also be the start of the Tories offering new solutions, different from Labour’s, but which engage with the things most voters are worried about. Ultimately, it is about re-engaging with the idea of the centre-right: a politics that is at once Right-wing and open to the mainstream public.

Most of all, it is about realising that the Tories have to take the fight to Farage, as he does to them. The question is whether the party will find a way to do so, or continue to drive itself into irrelevance.

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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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