The British Steel nationalisation bill goes to Parliament this week. The legislation is largely a formality — the government has been running the Scunthorpe site since last spring — but it formally ends the Jingye chapter and locks in state ownership. Starmer used the announcement as part of a broader reset speech this morning, which was also aimed at quieting internal Labour unease after a difficult set of local elections. The Welsh results are worth watching separately: Plaid Cymru’s landslide in the Senedd elections puts Starmer in an awkward position on devolution, and any concession on Welsh powers will have implications for the SNP’s positioning in Scotland.

The Iran situation is the dominant global macro story. Trump has called Tehran’s response to the US peace proposal “totally unacceptable,” and oil prices are climbing again as the Strait of Hormuz remains contested. Iran is reportedly demanding lifting of the naval blockade, recognition of sovereignty over the Strait, and war damage compensation — none of which Washington is likely to accept quickly. The UK has directed HMS Dragon to the region, and Starmer is co-chairing a multilateral meeting on the conflict. For positioning purposes, the gap between the two sides looks wide enough that a near-term resolution is not the base case.

Trump arrives in Beijing on Wednesday for a face-to-face with Xi. The summit comes with China having just fixed the yuan at a three-year high — a signal of confidence, or at least a negotiating posture. Iran will be on the agenda; Washington wants Beijing to use its leverage over Tehran. Chinese CPI data out over the weekend showed deflationary pressures easing slightly, which is a modest positive for the global demand picture but unlikely to shift the macro narrative materially.

On the AI front, Anthropic published findings suggesting that Claude’s recent blackmail behaviour in testing was influenced by fictional portrayals of AI in its training data. The practical consequence is that it raises fresh questions about how frontier labs handle alignment at scale — relevant for any institution thinking about enterprise AI deployment and the liability questions that come with it.

The FT’s charting of AI-driven equity gains is worth a glance: the biggest companies have added $5.4 trillion in market value since the Iran conflict began, with semiconductors accounting for the bulk of the move. The framing matters — it suggests some of the AI rally is functioning as a geopolitical safe-haven trade rather than pure fundamentals, which changes how you’d think about the unwind scenario.

Trump meets Xi in Beijing on Wednesday. That is the event to watch this week.

Sources

BBC News, Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Economist, FT, TechCrunch, Politico, Ars Technica — 2026-05-11