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

Britain is on course to ending up being a ‘second tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decrease and a weak armed force that undermines its effectiveness to allies, a specialist has cautioned.

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

The plain evaluation weighed that successive federal government failures in policy and bring in financial investment had 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 composed in The Henry Jackson Society’s most current 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, and that the main European country’s armed force will quickly go beyond the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are devalued to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be practically impossible to return. Nations don’t return from this,’ Dr Ibrahim informed MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be sped up decline unless we nip this in the bud and have vibrant leaders who have the ability to make the difficult decisions today.’

People pass boarded up shops 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 talk to Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the government’s decision to increase defence costs to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but warned much deeper, systemic issues threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a worldwide influential power.

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

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

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

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

‘This is a massive oversight on the part of subsequent federal governments, not just Starmer’s problem, of failing to invest in our military and basically contracting out 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 actually lead European defence. But none of the European countries are.’

Slowed defence spending and patterns of low efficiency are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s shock to the rules-based worldwide order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The previous consultant to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review noted in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the organizations as soon as ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by hurting the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘seems to be making significantly costly 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 actually been the source of much examination.

Negotiations in between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, but an agreement was announced by the Labour federal government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security think thank alerted at the time that ‘the move demonstrates worrying strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government refers to as being characterised by fantastic power competition’.

Calls for the U.K. to offer reparations for its historic function in the slave trade were rekindled also in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer stated ahead of a conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the program.

A Challenger 2 main battle tank of the British forces during 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 throughout a press conference 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 threat.

‘We understand soldiers and missiles but stop working to fully envisage the risk that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to respond to military aggression.’

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

‘Without immediate policy changes to reignite development, Britain will become a reduced power, reliant on stronger allies and vulnerable to foreign coercion,’ the Foreign Policy writer said.

‘As global economic competition magnifies, the U.K. needs to decide whether to accept a bold growth program or resign itself to irreversible decline.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero may be laudable, however the pursuit will inhibit development and obscure tactical goals, he cautioned.

‘I am not saying that the environment is trivial. But we simply can not manage to do this.

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

Nuclear power, including making use of little modular reactors, could be a boon for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

‘But we’ve stopped working to commercialise them and undoubtedly that’s going to take a significant quantity of time.’

Britain did present a brand-new financing model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour political leaders had insisted was crucial to finding the cash for expensive plant-building tasks.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has been heralded for its grants for small energy-producing business at home, business owners have actually cautioned a larger culture of ‘danger aversion’ in the U.K. stifles financial investment.

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million individuals 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 hazard’, permitting the pattern of handled decrease.

But the resurgence of autocracies on the world stage risks even more weakening the rules-based global order from which Britain ‘benefits immensely’ as a globalised economy.

‘The threat to this order … has actually established partially because of the absence of a robust will to defend it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the acknowledgment of the real hiding threat they present.’

The Trump administration’s alerting 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 not enough. He urged a top-down reform of ‘basically 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 take up enormous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS budget and it will truly not make much of a damage. So all of this will require essential reform and will take a lot of courage from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them undesirable.’

The report describes suggestions in radical tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a renewed focus on protecting Britain’s role as a leader in modern markets, energy security, and international trade.

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

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnancy might see it soon end up being a ‘second tier’ partner

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

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

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro area financial performance has actually been ‘suppressed’ since around 2018, showing ‘multifaceted challenges of energy dependence, producing vulnerabilities, and shifting international trade dynamics’.

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

This remains delicate, nevertheless, with citizens significantly agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are of budget friendly lodging and trapped in low paying seasonal tasks.

The Henry Jackson Society is a diplomacy and national security think thank based in the UK.

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