Chengkai Xie

Academy Associate @ChathamHouse /@SchwarzmanOrg Scholar 2023 / Spent time in @UKParliament / Ex-President @OxfordUnion

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

NEW: John Healey quits over defence funding. Devastating letter for the government and Keir Starmer: “You have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

@ZichenWanghere Hope you enjoyed the fish and chips canapés 😄

[Zichen Wang @ZichenWanghere]

Have been to a few receptions at embassies and have to report Peter Wilson, the UK Ambassador in China, is truly remarkable in hosting these events.

[Guy Opperman @GuyOpperman]

I want my country to do well … but this is further evidence that if the Labour Party choose to replace the PM with Burnham then there will be massive negative financial consequences … and it will not end well.

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

Look forward to reading this!

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

My new book: In Search of Greater India

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

Well … the “Boris meltdown” wasn’t that long ago …

[John Rentoul @JohnRentoul]

Keir Starmer is planning to tell ministers to quit if they back Andy Burnham or any other rival in a Labour leadership contest – FT https://t.co/ifEZJFW77u

[Yvette Cooper @YvetteCooperMP]

China is the second largest economy and like the UK is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We must engage for the UK’s security and prosperity in line with British values.

Met Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing today to discuss issues including re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, the war in Ukraine and Ebola.

[Adam Tooze @adam_tooze]

Behold the birth of … Ma Po Maultaschen! Sino-Swabian fusion.

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

@jujulemons A great summary!

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

Blair, Burnham, Streeting and Starmer all wrote essays this week. Here’s a summary of what they said for those who can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading about Labour’s favourite pastime: fighting about what it means to be Labour.

Blair's thesis is that Labour lost its nerve after 2007 and needs to rediscover the radical centre. Markets work, the private sector is your friend, competent technocratic government is still the answer, and the biggest transformative force on the horizon is AI, which he sees as a positive revolution that a serious centre-left government should embrace. Miss that wave and you miss everything. TLDR; the model isn't broken. Labour just needs to run it properly and stop indulging the perennial delusion that losing votes to the right means the country secretly wants you to go left.

Burnham, Streeting and Starmer think this misses the point. And they broadly agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the cure.

All three locate the origin of Britain's political unravelling in 2008, not 2007. The financial crisis broke the implicit bargain of modern capitalism: work hard, things get better. When that bargain collapsed and the banks got bailed out while wages stagnated for a decade, people got poorer – but also angry in a deeper, harder-to-satisfy way. And then austerity poured petrol on everything.

The more philosophically interesting disagreement is about what the crisis was actually a crisis of. Blair frames it as a delivery failure: the wrong policies and the wrong positioning. Starmer and Burnham both reach for ‘dignity’. The idea that whole communities (post-industrial, working class, people who didn't go to university) were made to feel invisible. That implies a fundamentally different kind of politics.

Burnham argues that New Labour never actually took Britain off the Thatcherite track. He blames deregulation, privatisation, leaving things to the market for the cost of living crisis. The centre failed people. You can't win them back by reasserting it more confidently. On AI, Burnham calls for tougher regulation of big tech and signals that an active, interventionist state would govern how AI develops rather than leaving it to the market. For Burnham, ungoverned AI is just the latest mechanism by which powerful interests extract value from everyone else.

Streeting is more moderate but lands in similar territory. Inequality is the organising fact of contemporary politics, and treating it as secondary is what produced the crisis in the first place. When the rules stop rewarding effort fairly, resentment grows.

Starmer agrees Britain should be an AI superpower, but where Blair frames AI as an opportunity to be seized, Starmer frames it as a force to be governed. The question isn't just whether AI grows the economy but whether Britain is a rule-maker or a rule-taker, and whether the gains flow to Blyth and Castleford or just to London.

The deepest difference, underneath all of this, is a question about whether the post-war and post-Thatcher economic settlement is fixable or finished. Blair thinks it needs better management and AI is the tool that makes better management possible. The others think the settlement itself was the problem, and are open to the possibility that AI (if ungoverned) compounds it by concentrating power further.

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

Gen Z:
– 3 languages
– 2 master’s degrees
– Underpayment
– Rent = 60% of salary
– Retirement at 70

Millennial↓

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

@profavi_ Says more about the three candidates than Sir Tony! But hats off to him

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:

- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly

Blair basically says all that.

The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:

- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs

None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it

Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.

Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

[Ameer Kotecha @Ameer_Kotecha]

You may resist for a while but eventually Tesco are going to force you to get that Clubcard

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

@Alex_Stafford @TfL Very sorry to hear this!

[Chengkai Xie @ChengkaiX]

@shashj Hear hear

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Nice to hear from you, Andy. Thanks for the by election. We live for such things.
I’m in no doubt life is tough for lots of folk in Makerfield. But it’s hardly a poster child for urban squalor/deprivation.
Thatcher left power in 1990. She was followed by seven years of unThatcher Major and 13 years of Labour government, of which you were a part. So it’s quite a stretch to blame her for any continuing woes. Unless we blame Labour for failing to put anything right.
On the other hand the houses you were walking past were bought by the tenants under Thatcher’s right to buy scheme, which has given them some pride in place and some wealth they once could only have dreamt of accumulating.
I assume your pledge to ‘renationalise housing’ does not include taking these homes back into public ownership ... even if that would constitute a proper, radical reversal of the Thatcherism you’re (some what bizarrely) campaigning against.

[Ameer Kotecha @Ameer_Kotecha]

Exactly. This is the most visible sign of how Labour’s leadership squabbles will come at the country’s expense.

In many important areas decisions will have to be deferred, and the civil service will go into a holding pattern until political leadership is restored.

I wrote in similar terms for LBC earlier this week: https://t.co/BarP2fkuZX

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

📍 Zhongnanhai, Beijing | May 15, 2026

[Mark Logan @Logan_ology]

Fascinating exchange:

“As President do you often host country leaders here at the garden”

“It’s very rare !”