Earlier this week, it was reported that Andy Burnham was drawing up plans to move parts of the prime ministerial operation to Manchester — or as some have dubbed it, a “No. 10 in the North”. The details at the moment are slim, but as the FT reports, this could involve Burnham setting up a personal office in Manchester as well as further devolving some Downing Street operations. At first glance, it fits neatly with the political brand that Burnham has spent years cultivating: the Northern outsider taking power away from Westminster elites and bringing it closer to the people. But is there actually a problem that the move would solve?

It is true that many voters, particularly in the North, feel disconnected from the goings on of Westminster. Trust in politicians and Britain’s institutions has collapsed, and large swaths of the country feel like their concerns have been sidelined for too long by a political class that has stopped listening.

Burnham’s solution, then, seems to miss the point. A voter in Hartlepool or Burnley does not feel ignored because they are 200 miles away from No. 10. They feel ignored because they are struggling to find housing, can’t get a GP appointment, face increasing taxes, and continue to see high levels of immigration despite repeated promises to bring it down. It does not matter to these people where decisions are taken if those decisions do not materially improve their lives.

In this sense, Burnham’s proposal feels less like a solution and more like a branding exercise. Moving parts of the Downing Street operation up North may move some Westminster politicians and civil servants closer to voters geographically, but it doesn’t move them any closer in understanding. So why does Burnham want to make this move?

A cynic might think it is an attempt to manufacture legitimacy before he becomes PM. For many years in opposition, Labour politicians argued that replacing a prime minister without consulting voters was an affront to democracy. Now that Burnham stands to benefit from that same process, the principle appears flexible.

This leaves him with a glaring legitimacy problem. Not only has he not led Labour into a general election, but many voters will also question how a man who wasn’t even an MP two weeks ago can suddenly emerge as the new leader of the country.

Unlike most Westminster politicians, Burnham possesses a ready-made alternative source of political legitimacy. While he has no direct mandate to become prime minister, he does have one as the elected Mayor of Greater Manchester. For nearly a decade, he has cultivated an identity as a Labour outsider, building his reputation on standing up for the North against the central government. He famously challenged Covid restrictions during the pandemic, earning him the moniker “King of the North” among supporters.

But now he is about to inherit the highest office in the land through the very political machinery he built his outsider reputation opposing. With no direct mandate to be the prime minister, it makes political sense to try to ground his authority in the one place where voters have repeatedly chosen him.

Viewed through that lens, Burnham’s Manchester proposal has less to do with redistributing power to the North than with anchoring his premiership in the office for which he actually possesses a recent democratic mandate. Successful politicians are not accidental in their symbolism, especially when they are vying to be the prime minister. The first ideas that emerge are usually designed to communicate something deeper than the policy itself. The Manchester proposal is Burnham setting out his stall to the public.

By tying his potential premiership to the one office for which voters have repeatedly chosen him, Andy Burnham is attempting to wrap his path to No. 10 in a democratic legitimacy that the process itself cannot provide. Burnham wants Manchester to legitimize him. But the harder task will be whether he can legitimize the Westminster system that could be set to make him the prime minister through the back door.

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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