Poland Set to ‘Quickly 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 decline and a weak armed force that weakens its usefulness to allies, an expert has actually warned.

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 misdirected policies that might see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at existing development rates.

The plain evaluation weighed that succeeding government failures in regulation and bring in investment had caused Britain to miss out on 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 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 behind Poland in terms of per capita income by 2030, and that the main European country’s armed force will quickly go beyond the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The problem is that as soon as we are devalued to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be almost impossible to get back. Nations do not come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim told MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be accelerated decline unless we nip this in the bud and have vibrant 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 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 during a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the federal government’s choice to increase defence costs to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, however cautioned much deeper, systemic problems threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as an internationally prominent power.

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

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‘Not just is the U.K. predicted to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, however likewise a smaller army and one that is not able to sustain deployment at scale.’

This is of specific issue at a time of increased geopolitical tension, with Britain pegged to be among the leading forces in Europe’s rapid rearmament job.

‘There are 230 brigades in Ukraine right now, Russian and Ukrainian. Not a single European nation to install 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 outsourcing 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 has to base 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 nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘failing to change’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based global order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The former advisor to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review noted in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the institutions as soon as ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is reacting by damaging the last vestiges of its military may and economic power.

The U.K., he said, ‘appears to be making significantly 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 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 believe thank warned at the time that ‘the relocation demonstrates fretting strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government refers to as being characterised by excellent power competition’.

Calls for the U.K. to supply reparations for its historical role in the servant trade were revived likewise in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a meeting of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the agenda.

A Challenger 2 primary battle tank of the British forces during 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 evaluated that the U.K. appears to be acting versus its own security interests in part due to a narrow understanding of threat.

‘We comprehend soldiers and missiles however stop working to totally envisage the danger that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to react to military aggression.’

He recommended a new security design to ‘boost the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and hazard assessment, access to rare earth minerals in a market controlled by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and independence by means of investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without instant policy changes to reignite growth, Britain will become a lessened power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign browbeating,’ the Foreign Policy writer said.

‘As worldwide financial competitors magnifies, the U.K. needs to choose whether to welcome a bold growth agenda or resign itself to permanent decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero may be admirable, but the pursuit will inhibit growth and odd tactical goals, he alerted.

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

‘We are a nation that has stopped working to purchase our economic, in our energy infrastructure. And we have substantial resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, including using small modular reactors, could be a benefit for the British economy and energy independence.

‘But we’ve stopped working to commercialise them and obviously 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 including Labour politicians had actually insisted was crucial to discovering the cash for pricey plant-building projects.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development company, has been heralded for its grants for small energy-producing companies in the house, entrepreneurs have actually cautioned a larger culture of ‘threat hostility’ 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 picture of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has actually regularly stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian risk’, allowing the pattern of handled decrease.

But the renewal of autocracies on the world phase risks even more weakening the rules-based worldwide order from which Britain ‘advantages immensely’ as a .

‘The threat to this order … has established partly since of the absence of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to deliberate foreign efforts to overturn the acknowledgment of the true prowling hazard they position.’

The Trump administration’s cautioning to NATO allies in Europe that they will need to do their own bidding has gone some way towards waking Britain up to the urgency of investing in defence.

But Dr Ibrahim warned 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 immense amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

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

The report outlines suggestions in extreme tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a restored focus on securing Britain’s role as a leader in state-of-the-art markets, energy security, and global trade.

Vladimir Putin talks with 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 stagnation could see it soon become a ‘second tier’ partner

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

Britain is not alone in falling behind. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe spend for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire scenario after decades of sluggish development and reduced costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research assessed at the end of in 2015 that Euro location economic efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ since around 2018, illustrating ‘complex difficulties of energy dependence, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and moving global trade dynamics’.

There stay profound inconsistencies 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 stays vulnerable, however, with citizens progressively upset by the perceived pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of cost effective accommodation and trapped in low paying seasonal jobs.

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

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