When Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips addressed a nearly empty House of Commons yesterday, she tackled one of the most explosive issues in British politics: child sexual abuse. Yet the timing of her statement — discreetly scheduled for the last sitting day before the Easter recess, with MPs informed barely an hour in advance — signaled clearly that the Government is seeking to evade any meaningful scrutiny.

The content of her speech revealed precisely why: what was supposed to be a comprehensive update on Labour’s action against child sexual abuse amounted to little more than a dilution of the already inadequate measures announced in January.

Phillips’s speech received immediate criticism in the chamber from Conservative MPs Robbie Moore and Katie Lam. The latter’s forceful rebuttal quoted graphic details from court transcripts, and directly questioned whether the Government would admit the crimes were racially motivated. Yet Phillips dismissed Lam’s concerns, claiming that focusing on ethnicity in grooming gangs ignores findings supposedly settled by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which was published in 2022. This position, however, is misleading at best.

None of the IICSA report’s 20 recommendations were implemented. For this reason, as well as the fact that it took seven years and £6 million to complete, the likes of Phillips deny that a new national inquiry is necessary: we’ve already done the work, they suggest, so why should we waste time doing it again?

If you want to deliver useful and actionable recommendations in a report, you need to carefully and methodically approach one question at a time. But the IICSA report is the opposite, blending familial, institutional, online, and gang-based abuse into a generalized picture of systemic failure, then attempting to compress them into a set of 20 recommendations.

It’s obfuscation by aggregation: crucial distinctions between types of abuse and the communities in which they flourish are entirely absent. Considering the undeniable pattern in high-profile cases from Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, and Telford — where predominantly South Asian Muslim men systematically targeted vulnerable white girls — ignoring ethnic dimensions can only be intentional evasion.

Methodologically, the report is weakened by its own admitted data gaps. Ethnicity is not consistently recorded in local cases; national-level statistics are similarly unreliable, with ethnicity going unrecorded in 28-86% of cases. There is no current investigation into policing practice around the collection of ethnicity, and why it appears to be in decline. In most democracies, the state publishes offender demographics for serious crimes. In Britain, the most reliable data on grooming gangs has come not from police or Government agencies, but instead from investigative reporters and independent academics.

The IICSA report’s refusal to examine in depth the cases which catalyzed public awareness, including Rotherham and Rochdale, is another egregious decision. The former town is mentioned only once; the latter is only referenced when discussing Cyril Smith, who served as MP for 20 years and was later found to have prolifically abused young boys in Rochdale.

To imply that the publication of this report “closes the book” on ethnically motivated gang based grooming, as Phillips did yesterday, sends a message to victims that their experiences have been brushed aside, and to perpetrators that their networks remain beyond scrutiny. It’s no surprise that it has been condemned by survivors and by campaigners including the whistleblower and former detective Maggie Oliver, who called it a “cover-up”. Today, former Labour politician Trevor Phillips accused the party of a “shameful” response to the scandal, motivated by a fear of offending Pakistani voters.

Phillips’ dismissive response to Lam, suggesting that she should “read the report”, betrays either ignorance or willful blindness to the earlier inquiry’s deep inadequacies. Issues raised by Lam, such as Rochdale’s grooming gang leader being employed as a welfare rights officer by Oldham Council or a social worker attending the wedding of a victim to her abuser, reveal corruption that mere administrative changes won’t fix.

Referencing the IICSA report to block a national inquiry is usually an expression of ignorance. However, when done by a member of the Government — who must be well-informed about its contents and the crimes of the gangs — it can only be interpreted as a deflection of accountability in responding to some of the worst crimes ever committed on these shores.

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Adam Wren is an analyst and the founder of Open Justice.

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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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