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

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘second tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to economic decrease and a weak military that undermines its usefulness to allies, an expert has cautioned.

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

The plain evaluation weighed that successive federal government failures in policy and attracting financial investment had triggered Britain to lose out on the ‘industries of the future’ courted by established economies.

‘Britain no longer has the commercial base to logistically sustain a war with a near-peer like Russia for more than 2 months,’ he wrote in The Henry Jackson Society’s latest report, Strategic Prosperity: The Case for Economic Growth as a National Security Priority.

The report assesses that Britain is now on track to fall behind Poland in regards to per capita earnings by 2030, which the central European country’s armed force will soon surpass the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are reduced to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be almost difficult to return. Nations don’t come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim told MailOnline today.

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

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

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

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

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the government’s decision to increase defence costs to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, however cautioned much deeper, systemic issues threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a globally prominent power.

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

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‘Not just is the U.K. anticipated to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, however likewise a smaller sized army and one that is unable to sustain release at scale.’

This is of specific concern at a time of heightened geopolitical stress, with Britain pegged to be among the leading forces in Europe’s rapid rearmament task.

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

‘This is a huge oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not just Starmer’s issue, of failing to buy our military and basically contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue of supplying 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 actually lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

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

The previous 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 ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by damaging the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

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

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

Negotiations between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, however a contract was announced by the Labour federal government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security think thank warned at the time that ‘the move demonstrates stressing strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. federal government explains as being characterised by terrific power competitors’.

Calls for the U.K. to provide reparations for its historical function in the servant trade were rekindled also in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer stated ahead of a conference of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the agenda.

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

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

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

‘We comprehend soldiers and rockets but stop working to fully the threat that having no option to China’s supply chains might have on our capability to react to military aggression.’

He suggested a new security design to ‘improve the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and threat evaluation, access to unusual 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 atomic energy.

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

‘As international economic competition intensifies, the U.K. should decide whether to embrace a strong development program or resign itself to permanent decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the idea of Net Zero might be admirable, but the pursuit will hinder development and obscure strategic goals, he cautioned.

‘I am not stating that the environment is trivial. But we merely can not afford to do this.

‘We are a country that has actually stopped working to invest in our economic, in our energy facilities. And we have significant resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, consisting of making use of small modular reactors, might be an advantage for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

‘But we’ve stopped working to commercialise them and certainly that’s going to take a considerable amount of time.’

Britain did present a brand-new funding model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists consisting of Labour politicians had actually insisted was crucial to discovering the cash for costly plant-building jobs.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development company, has actually been declared for its grants for little energy-producing companies in your home, business owners have cautioned a wider culture of ‘danger aversion’ in the U.K. suppresses investment.

In 2022, earnings 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 consistently stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian threat’, enabling the pattern of managed decline.

But the renewal of autocracies on the world stage risks further undermining the rules-based worldwide order from which Britain ‘advantages immensely’ as a globalised economy.

‘The risk to this order … has established partly since of the absence of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to ponder foreign efforts to subvert the acknowledgment of the real prowling risk they posture.’

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 seriousness of buying defence.

But Dr Ibrahim cautioned that this is not enough. He advised a top-down reform of ‘basically our whole 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 take up tremendous amounts of funds and they’ll just keep growing considerably,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget and it will actually not make much of a damage. So all of this will need fundamental reform and will take a lot of guts from whomever is in power since it will make them unpopular.’

The report outlines recommendations in extreme tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed focus on securing Britain’s role as a leader in state-of-the-art industries, energy security, and international trade.

Vladimir Putin talks to the guv of Arkhangelsk area Alexander Tsybulsky during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File photo. Britain’s financial stagnancy could see it quickly become a ‘second tier’ partner

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

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe pay for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming situation after years of slow growth and lowered costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research assessed at the end of in 2015 that Euro location economic performance has actually been ‘controlled’ since around 2018, highlighting ‘diverse challenges of energy reliance, producing vulnerabilities, and moving international trade dynamics’.

There stay extensive discrepancies between European economies; German deindustrialisation has actually hit businesses difficult and forced redundancies, while Spain has grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This remains vulnerable, nevertheless, with citizens significantly upset by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of budget-friendly lodging and caught in low paying seasonal jobs.

The Henry Jackson Society is a foreign policy and nationwide security believe thank based in the United Kingdom.

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