The SNP has a unique capacity for generating internal rows over issues which have little to do with Scottish independence. The transgender reform bill comes to mind. Now, days out from its annual conference, the party’s leadership is in turmoil over genocide denial in Gaza.

On Saturday, the party suspended Glasgow Shettleston MSP John Mason for saying he didn’t believe that Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza. His remarks outraged bien pensant nationalists who loathe Mason, an evangelical Christian, for having also opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. “You glorify killing and murder with your obtuse comment,” fulminated former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, urging the MSP to go. The whip was duly withdrawn for Mason “bringing the party into disrepute”.

By that point, the SNP External Affairs Secretary, Angus Robertson, had just had a meeting with the Israeli deputy ambassador, Daniela Grudsky. Was this not lending legitimacy to the genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, asked MPs such as Brendan O’Hara? Prominent nationalists have supported a motion ahead of this month’s conference calling for Robertson to be suspended pending an investigation.

However, it then emerged that the meeting had been authorised by the First Minister himself, John Swinney. According to SNP logic, this meant that the party leader was now guilty of bringing the party into disrepute. The FM insists the meeting was only held to urge an immediate ceasefire. Robertson has also delivered a grovelling apology, but discontent lingers.

It’s not as if the SNP doesn’t have enough to argue about at its first conference since the general election disaster, when it lost 39 of its 48 MPs. The campaign for a repeat referendum has collapsed, not least because of Swinney’s ill-advised decision to make the case for it dependent on the SNP winning a majority of seats. The rage had to go somewhere, and recently it has focused on personalities such as Mason and Robertson, who do not fully subscribe to the SNP’s progressive agenda.

Under Nicola Sturgeon, the nationalists sought to enlist to the cause any and every special interest with a grievance against Westminster or Tory governments. This explains the genuflection toward causes such as LGBTQ advocacy, green activism and the pro-Palestine movement. And unlike many nationalist parties in Europe, the SNP is also almost fanatically pro-immigration.

The objective throughout has been to bolster the moral justification for leaving the Union by portraying the UK as essentially racist, transphobic, prone to climate-change denial and, of course, soft on Israel. But now that independence is off the agenda for a generation, the SNP has been left with little to obsess over other than the various progressive causes which it has championed. Hence the row about a conflict in Gaza over which the Scottish Government has precisely zero influence or control.

It’s a form of displacement activity. Bereft of real traitors to the nationalist cause, activists have resorted to pillorying ideological deviants instead. Inconveniently, one of them appears to be the party leader.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

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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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