Poland Set to ‘Soon 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 decline and a weak military that weakens its usefulness to allies, a professional has alerted.

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

The plain assessment weighed that succeeding government failures in guideline and bring in investment had caused Britain to miss out on the ‘markets 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 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 evaluates that Britain is now on track to fall back Poland in terms of per capita earnings by 2030, and that the main European nation’s military will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and devices on the present trajectory.

‘The concern is that when we are downgraded to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be practically difficult 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 are able to make the challenging choices right now.’

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

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

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

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

With a weakening commercial base, Britain’s usefulness to its allies is now ‘falling back 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 likewise a smaller army and one that is not able to sustain deployment at scale.’

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

‘There are 230 brigades in Ukraine right now, 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 problem, of stopping working to invest in our military and essentially contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue of offering the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now has 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 spending and patterns of low efficiency are absolutely nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘failing to change’ to the Trump administration’s shock to the rules-based worldwide order, said 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 organizations once ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by harming the last vestiges of its military might and economic power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘seems to be making increasingly 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 an agreement was revealed by the Labour government last October.

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

Calls for the U.K. to provide reparations for its historical function in the slave trade were rekindled likewise in October in 2015, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the agenda.

An Opposition 2 main battle 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 throughout 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 threat.

‘We understand soldiers and rockets however stop working to fully develop of the threat that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our capability to react to military aggression.’

He recommended a brand-new security model to ‘boost the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and threat evaluation, 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 modifications to reignite development, Britain will end up being a reduced power, reliant on more powerful allies and vulnerable to foreign coercion,’ the Foreign Policy columnist said.

‘As international economic competitors heightens, the U.K. must choose whether to accept a vibrant development agenda or resign itself to permanent decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero may be admirable, but the pursuit will prevent development and odd tactical objectives, he alerted.

‘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 purchase our economic, in our energy infrastructure. And we have substantial resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, including using little modular reactors, might be a boon for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

‘But we’ve failed to commercialise them and clearly that’s going to take a considerable quantity of time.’

Britain did introduce a new funding model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists consisting of Labour political leaders had insisted was essential to discovering the cash for costly plant-building projects.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has actually been declared for its grants for little energy-producing business in your home, business owners have actually alerted a wider culture of ‘risk aversion’ in the U.K. suppresses financial investment.

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million by 7.5%, per the ONS. Pictured: Waterlooville High Street, Waterlooville, Hants

Undated file image of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has actually regularly stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian danger’, allowing the trend of managed decline.

But the revival of autocracies on the world stage dangers even more undermining the rules-based international order from which Britain ‘advantages immensely’ as a globalised economy.

‘The hazard to this order … has actually developed partly since of the absence of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to deliberate foreign efforts to subvert the acknowledgment of the true lurking risk they posture.’

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

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

‘Reforming the welfare state, reforming the NHS, reforming pensions – these are essentially bodies that take up enormous quantities of funds and they’ll just keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS spending plan and it will really not make much of a damage. So all of this will need basic reform and will take a lot of guts from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them undesirable.’

The report describes recommendations in radical tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed concentrate on securing Britain’s function as a leader in high-tech markets, energy security, and global trade.

Vladimir Putin consults with 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 stagnation might see it quickly end up being a ‘second 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 behind. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe spend for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming situation after decades of sluggish growth and decreased spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research examined at the end of last year that Euro area economic efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ since around 2018, illustrating ‘multifaceted difficulties of energy dependence, making vulnerabilities, and moving global trade dynamics’.

There stay profound inconsistencies between European economies; German deindustrialisation has struck businesses difficult and forced redundancies, while Spain has grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This stays delicate, nevertheless, with residents progressively agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of budget friendly accommodation and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

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

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