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

Britain is on course to ending up being a ‘second tier’ European nation like Spain or Italy due to financial decrease and a weak armed force that undermines its usefulness to allies, an expert has actually alerted.

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

The plain assessment weighed that successive government failures in guideline and attracting investment had triggered Britain to lose out on the ‘markets of the future’ courted by established economies.

‘Britain no longer has the industrial 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 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 back Poland in regards to per capita income by 2030, which the main European nation’s armed force will quickly go beyond the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The concern is that once we are devalued to a second tier middle power, it’s going to be practically impossible to get back. 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 strong leaders who have the ability to make the tough choices 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 utilizes a radio to speak with Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery during a live fire variety on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the government’s decision to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, however alerted much deeper, systemic concerns threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as an internationally influential power.

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

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‘Not only is the U.K. forecasted to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, however likewise 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 tension, with Britain pegged to be amongst 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 mount a single heavy armoured brigade.’

‘This is an enormous oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not just Starmer’s issue, of failing to buy our military and essentially contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he informed 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 been in a premium position to really 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 likewise ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based global order, stated Dr Ibrahim.

The previous advisor to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the institutions once ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is reacting by harming the last vestiges of its military might and economic power.

The U.K., he said, ‘seems to be making increasingly costly 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 been the source of much analysis.

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

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

Calls for the U.K. to provide reparations for its historic function in the slave trade were revived also in October in 2015, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a meeting of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the program.

An Opposition 2 primary fight 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 an interview in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

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

‘We understand soldiers and missiles but fail to fully envisage the danger that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to react to military aggressiveness.’

He suggested a brand-new security design to ‘improve the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and danger 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 growth, Britain will end up being a lessened power, reliant on more powerful allies and vulnerable to foreign browbeating,’ the Foreign Policy columnist stated.

‘As worldwide economic competition intensifies, the U.K. must choose whether to embrace a bold growth agenda or resign itself to irreversible decrease.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero may be admirable, however the pursuit will inhibit development and odd tactical goals, he warned.

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

‘We are a country that has failed to buy 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 an advantage for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development firm, has been declared for its grants for small energy-producing companies in your home, business owners have actually cautioned a wider culture of ‘danger hostility’ in the U.K. suppresses 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 picture of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

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

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

‘The hazard to this order … has actually developed partly since of the lack of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the recognition of the real lurking danger they position.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim alerted that this is inadequate. He urged a top-down reform of ‘essentially 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 basically bodies that use up tremendous amounts of funds and they’ll just keep growing substantially,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS spending plan and it will truly not make much of a damage. So all of this will require essential reform and will take a great deal of nerve from whomever is in power because it will make them unpopular.’

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 speaks to the governor of Arkhangelsk region Alexander Tsybulsky during their conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File picture. stagnation could see it soon 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 behind. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe pay for its own defence has actually cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire situation after years of sluggish development and lowered spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research examined at the end of last year that Euro area economic performance has been ‘suppressed’ given that around 2018, illustrating ‘complex difficulties of energy dependence, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and moving global trade characteristics’.

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

This remains fragile, nevertheless, with homeowners significantly upset by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of cost effective lodging and caught in low paying seasonal jobs.

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

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