Poland Set to ‘Quickly Overtake Britain in Military Strength And Income’

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘2nd tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decrease and a weak military that undermines its effectiveness to allies, an expert has actually alerted.

Research teacher Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE concluded in a damning new report that the U.K. has been paralysed by low financial investment, high tax and misguided policies that might see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at existing growth rates.

The stark evaluation weighed that succeeding government failures in regulation and attracting investment had actually triggered Britain to lose out on the ‘industries of the future’ courted by developed economies.

‘Britain no longer has the commercial base to logistically sustain a war with a near-peer like Russia for more than two months,’ he wrote in The Henry Jackson Society’s newest report, Strategic Prosperity: The Case for Economic Growth as a National Security Priority.

The report examines that Britain is now on track to fall back Poland in terms of per capita income by 2030, and that the main European country’s armed force will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and equipment on the existing trajectory.

‘The concern is that once we are devalued to a second tier middle power, it’s going to be almost impossible to get back. Nations don’t come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim informed MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be sped up decrease unless we nip this in the bud and have vibrant leaders who have the ability to make the difficult choices right now.’

People pass boarded up stores on March 20, 2024 in Hastings, England

A British soldier reloads his rifle on February 17, 2025 in Smardan, Romania

Staff Sergeant Rai uses a radio to speak to Archer teams from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire variety on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the federal government’s choice to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but cautioned much deeper, systemic concerns threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a globally influential power.

With a weakening commercial base, Britain’s usefulness to its allies is now ‘falling back even second-tier European powers’, he alerted.

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‘Not only is the U.K. forecasted to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, but also a smaller army and one that is not able to sustain deployment at scale.’

This is of particular concern at a time of heightened geopolitical stress, with Britain pegged to be amongst the leading forces in Europe’s quick rearmament job.

‘There are 230 brigades in Ukraine right now, Russian and Ukrainian. Not a single European country to install a single heavy armoured brigade.’

‘This is an enormous oversight on the part of subsequent federal governments, not just Starmer’s problem, of failing to invest in our military and basically outsourcing security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting tiredness of offering the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs to stand on its own and the U.K. would have remained in a premium position to really lead European defence. But none of the European countries are.’

Slowed defence costs and patterns of low performance are absolutely nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based global order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The former consultant to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the institutions when ‘secured’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by harming the last vestiges of its military may and economic power.

The U.K., he said, ‘appears to be making progressively expensive gestures’ like the ₤ 9bn handover of the tactical Chagos Islands and opening talks on reparations for Caribbean Slavery.

The surrender of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean has actually been the source of much analysis.

Negotiations between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, however an arrangement was revealed by the Labour federal government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security think thank cautioned at the time that ‘the relocation demonstrates fretting strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government refers to as being characterised by terrific power competitors’.

Calls for the U.K. to provide reparations for its historic role in the slave trade were revived likewise in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the agenda.

A Challenger 2 main battle tank of the British forces throughout the NATO’s Spring Storm exercise in Kilingi-Nomme, Estonia, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk speak during a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

Dr Ibhramin assessed that the U.K. seems to be acting versus its own security interests in part due to a narrow understanding of threat.

‘We understand soldiers and rockets but stop working to totally envisage the risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our capability to react to military aggression.’

He suggested a brand-new security design to ‘enhance the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and danger evaluation, access to uncommon earth minerals in a market dominated by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and self-reliance through investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without instant policy changes to reignite growth, Britain will end up being a diminished power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign coercion,’ the Diplomacy columnist said.

‘As worldwide financial competition intensifies, the U.K. must choose whether to welcome a strong development agenda or resign itself to irreversible decline.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero may be laudable, but the pursuit will hinder growth and unknown strategic goals, he warned.

‘I am not saying that the environment is not crucial. But we just can not pay for to do this.

‘We are a country that has failed to purchase our financial, in our energy infrastructure. And we have significant resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, including making use of small modular reactors, might be a boon for the British economy and energy independence.

‘But we’ve failed to commercialise them and clearly that’s going to take a considerable amount of time.’

Britain did present a new funding model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists consisting of Labour political leaders had insisted was essential to finding the cash for expensive plant-building jobs.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has been declared for its grants for small energy-producing business in your home, entrepreneurs have alerted a larger culture of ‘danger aversion’ in the U.K. stifles investment.

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5%, per the ONS. Pictured: Waterlooville High Street, Waterlooville, Hants

Undated file photo of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has actually regularly failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian hazard’, allowing the pattern of managed decrease.

But the revival of autocracies on the world phase dangers even more undermining the rules-based worldwide order from which Britain ‘benefits tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The risk to this order … has actually established partially due to the fact that of the absence of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to deliberate foreign efforts to overturn the recognition of the real hiding risk they present.’

The Trump administration’s warning to NATO allies in Europe that they will need to do their own bidding has gone some method towards waking Britain approximately the urgency of buying defence.

But Dr Ibrahim warned that this is insufficient. He advised a top-down reform of ‘essentially our entire state’ to bring the ossified state back to life and sustain it.

‘Reforming the well-being state, reforming the NHS, reforming pensions – these are essentially bodies that use up tremendous quantities of funds and they’ll just keep growing significantly,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget and it will really not make much of a dent. So all of this will require fundamental reform and will take a lot of courage from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them unpopular.’

The report details suggestions in radical tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed concentrate on protecting Britain’s function as a leader in modern industries, energy security, and international trade.

Vladimir Putin speaks with the guv of Arkhangelsk region Alexander Tsybulsky during their conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnation could see it quickly become a ‘2nd tier’ partner

Boarded-up stores in Blackpool as more than 13,000 shops closed their doors for great in 2024

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s insistence that Europe spend for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire circumstance after years of sluggish development and lowered spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of last year that Euro area economic performance has been ‘suppressed’ considering that around 2018, highlighting ‘diverse obstacles of energy reliance, making vulnerabilities, and shifting global trade characteristics’.

There stay profound inconsistencies in between European economies; German deindustrialisation has actually struck organizations tough and forced redundancies, while Spain has grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This remains delicate, nevertheless, with residents increasingly upset by the perceived pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of affordable accommodation and caught in low paying seasonal jobs.

The Henry Jackson Society is a foreign policy and national believe thank based in the UK.

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