That Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is even in contention in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election this week is itself a remarkable development in Scottish politics. Farage has long been a hate figure in nationalist and Labour demonology. When he visited Scotland 12 years ago, he had to be rescued by police from an Edinburgh pub, at which point he was pursued further by anti-racist demonstrators.

Protesters were again present when Farage spoke in Aberdeen this morning, but they were comparatively muted. The Reform leader launched an attack on Net Zero, which he blames for the “deindustrialization” of Scotland. Aberdeen is the center of the North Sea oil and gas industry, and there have been significant job losses recently blamed on windfall taxes and Labour’s ban on new drilling.

“Net Zero is the new Brexit,” Farage declared to a skeptical press, as he unveiled Reform’s first Labour defector, councillor Jamie McGuire. He then departed for what he’s dubbed the Hamilton “catfight” — the by-election triggered by the death of SNP MSP Christina McKelvie.

This Lanarkshire seat is in traditional Labour territory. Only nine months ago, the party was supremely confident that seats like it would return to the fold. Those hopes have wilted, and an internal inquest is already underway over what has gone wrong. Keir Starmer, in Scotland today for his big defense announcement, has declined even to visit Hamilton.

While there have not yet been opinion polls in the constituency, Reform has been neck and neck with Labour in recent national polls in Scotland, behind the SNP. First Minister John Swinney insists that Hamilton is “a two-horse race” between the SNP and Reform. Few expect Farage’s party to actually win on Thursday, but even polling guru John Curtice refused to rule it out on the BBC today. Turnout is expected to be low as Scottish voters express their disgust at parties across the political spectrum: the vote is far from a foregone conclusion.

However, in a sense, it doesn’t matter. Reform has won even if its candidate, Ross Lambie, loses on Thursday. In the last Westminster contest in this area, Reform’s vote was 8%. Yet the party is suddenly being regarded by leading politicians and commentators as potential winners in a country where it has no track record and almost no ground operation.

Last week, Reform outraged the Left in the country by accusing Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar of “prioritizing the Pakistani community”. Sarwar, along with much of the Scottish press, said this claim was “obviously racist” and accused Farage of being “a nasty little man only interested in sowing division”. Reform doubled down, and today Farage responded that it was Sarwar who is “obsessed by race” and that only his party is truly “color-blind”.

It was astonishing for Reform to lead with race in a country which is supposed to be a bastion of the liberal Left. But perhaps Farage has sensed something in the air. An opinion poll in the Sunday Times yesterday suggested that more than half of Scots are indeed concerned about immigration and want it curbed. If the Reform leader sounds as if he is already on a victory tour, that is partly because he has shown his party can be a player even in Scotland. What’s more, he has done serious damage to the myth of “Scottish exceptionalism”.

---

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.

iainmacwhirter

---

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.

---

Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

---