Former prime minister Tony Blair has questioned the benefits of the British monarchy apologising for its historic role in the transatlantic slave trade.

In an interview with Newsweek today promoting his new book On Leadership, Blair said that it was “absurd” to judge history by today’s moral standards. When asked by Newsweek‘s Global Editor-in-Chief Nancy Cooper whether he thought King Charles should apologise for slavery, Blair said: “I think [with] all of these arguments, you can go back over history and you end up in a completely absurd position.”

“I have no idea what Winston Churchill’s views are on transgender. I don’t suppose he was ever asked and he probably never thought about it,” Blair said. “But who knows? But supposing it was found that he had, let’s say, not entirely modern views on this — which is quite possible — does that mean he was a bad guy?” He added: “Slavery was a horrible thing. It should never have happened. Of course we [the British Empire] were wrong”.

The New Labour grandee’s comments come as the King and Queen have recently arrived in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting after spending time in Australia. King Charles’s visit to Parliament House in Canberra was marred by heckling from Senator Lidia Thorpe, who shouted: “This is not your land. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. You are not my King.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also attending the Commonwealth summit, but Number 10 has confirmed that reparations payments to former colonies of the British empire are “not on the agenda”.

Pressed further on whether the King should apologise for Britain’s imperial past, the 71-year-old questioned the notion. “It’s up to him to say that, but what are people trying to prove here?”

Blair went on: “Of course [King Charles] thinks it’s wrong and when you look back in history, you say, ‘Well, those things were terrible.’ To be fair you had people at the time saying it was terrible and you had [abolitionist William] Wilberforce and others who brought about change. But what does it really profit anyone to go back over these things?”

Instead, the former PM insisted that it was far more beneficial to help poor countries now rather than relitigate the moral complexities of the past. “The most important thing we can do for countries that have been marked by colonialism is to help them now,” he said, “which we do and we should do more of.”

Blair added: “The most beneficial thing to do is not to go over what happened in the 19th century but to help them reap the benefits of the technology revolution of the 21st century.”

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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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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