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 economic decline and a weak military that weakens its effectiveness to allies, an expert has cautioned.

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

The plain assessment weighed that successive federal government failures in guideline and bring in investment had triggered Britain to miss out on 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 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 main European nation’s military will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The problem is that as soon as we are reduced to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be almost difficult to get back. Nations do not 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 challenging 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 crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range 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, however alerted much deeper, systemic issues threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as an internationally 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 just is the U.K. anticipated to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, but also a smaller army and one that is not able to sustain implementation at scale.’

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

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

‘This is a massive oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not simply Starmer’s issue, of failing to purchase our military and basically outsourcing security to the United States and NATO,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting tiredness of supplying the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs to base 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 costs and patterns of low performance are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s shock to the rules-based worldwide 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 once ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is reacting by hurting the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he said, ‘seems to be making significantly 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 scrutiny.

Negotiations between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, however 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 warned at the time that ‘the move shows worrying tactical ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government refers to as being characterised by excellent power competitors’.

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

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 during an interview in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

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

‘We understand soldiers and rockets but fail to completely envisage the threat that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our ability to react to military hostility.’

He recommended a new security model to ‘boost the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and danger assessment, access to unusual earth minerals in a market controlled by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and self-reliance through financial investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on atomic energy.

‘Without instant policy modifications to reignite development, Britain will become a diminished power, reliant on more powerful allies and vulnerable to foreign browbeating,’ the Diplomacy columnist said.

‘As worldwide economic competition magnifies, the U.K. must choose whether to welcome a strong development agenda or resign itself to permanent decrease.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero may be laudable, but the pursuit will inhibit development and unknown tactical objectives, he cautioned.

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

‘We are a nation that has actually failed to invest in our financial, in our energy facilities. And we have significant resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, consisting of the usage of small modular reactors, might be a benefit 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 introduce a new financing design for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour politicians had actually insisted was essential to finding the cash for expensive plant-building jobs.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development firm, has actually been declared for its grants for small energy-producing companies at home, business owners have actually warned a broader culture of ‘danger hostility’ in the U.K. suppresses financial 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 consistently failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian risk’, permitting the trend of handled decline.

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

‘The hazard to this order … has actually established partially since of the absence of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the acknowledgment of the hazard they posture.’

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

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

‘Reforming the welfare state, reforming the NHS, reforming pensions – these are basically bodies that use up immense amounts of funds and they’ll just keep growing substantially,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget plan and it will truly not make much of a dent. So all of this will need fundamental reform and will take a lot of nerve from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them out of favor.’

The report outlines suggestions in radical tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a restored concentrate on protecting Britain’s role as a leader in state-of-the-art industries, energy security, and worldwide trade.

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

File image. Britain’s economic stagnancy might see it soon end up being a ‘2nd tier’ partner

Boarded-up shops 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 persistence that Europe pay for its own defence has actually cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming situation after decades of sluggish growth and minimized spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research assessed at the end of last year that Euro location financial performance has actually been ‘suppressed’ considering that around 2018, highlighting ‘diverse difficulties of energy dependency, producing vulnerabilities, and moving worldwide trade characteristics’.

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

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

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

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