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

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘2nd tier’ European nation like Spain or Italy due to economic decrease and a weak military that weakens its usefulness to allies, a professional has warned.

Research professor 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 could see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at existing growth rates.

The plain assessment weighed that successive federal government failures in guideline and drawing in financial investment had triggered Britain to lose out on the ‘industries of the future’ courted by developed 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 composed in The Henry Jackson Society’s latest 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 regards to per capita earnings by 2030, and that the main European country’s armed force will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and devices on the existing trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are devalued to a second tier middle power, it’s going to be almost impossible to return. Nations do not come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim informed MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be accelerated decrease unless we nip this in the bud and have vibrant leaders who are able to make the difficult 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 uses a radio to speak to Archer teams from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, during Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the federal government’s choice to increase defence spending 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 an internationally influential power.

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

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‘Not only 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 unable to sustain implementation at scale.’

This is of particular concern at a time of increased geopolitical stress, with Britain pegged to be amongst the leading forces in Europe’s rapid 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 huge oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not just Starmer’s problem, of failing to invest in our military and essentially outsourcing security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting tiredness of supplying 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 in fact lead European defence. But none of the European countries are.’

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

The former consultant to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind 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 may and economic power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘appears to be making progressively pricey 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 actually been the source of much scrutiny.

Negotiations between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, but an agreement 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 fretting strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government explains as being characterised by fantastic power competitors’.

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

A Challenger 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 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.

soldiers and rockets however stop working to totally conceive of the danger that having no option to China’s supply chains might have on our capability to react to military hostility.’

He recommended a brand-new security design to ‘enhance the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based on 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 independence via financial investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without instant policy changes to reignite development, Britain will end up being a reduced power, reliant on stronger allies and vulnerable to foreign browbeating,’ the Diplomacy columnist stated.

‘As international economic competitors magnifies, the U.K. needs to choose whether to welcome a strong development agenda or resign itself to irreparable decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero might be laudable, but the pursuit will prevent development and obscure strategic objectives, he warned.

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

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

Nuclear power, consisting of the use of small modular reactors, could be a benefit for the British economy and energy independence.

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has been declared for its grants for small energy-producing companies at home, business owners have alerted a larger culture of ‘danger hostility’ in the U.K. suppresses financial 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 photo of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has regularly stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian hazard’, allowing the trend of managed decrease.

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

‘The threat to this order … has developed partially due to the fact that of the absence of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to subvert the acknowledgment of the real lurking hazard they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim cautioned that this is not enough. He advised 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 basically bodies that use up enormous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS budget and it will actually not make much of a damage. So all of this will require fundamental reform and will take a great deal of courage from whomever is in power because it will make them unpopular.’

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

Vladimir Putin speaks with the guv of Arkhangelsk area Alexander Tsybulsky during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File picture. Britain’s financial stagnation could 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 excellent in 2024

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s insistence that Europe pay for its own defence has actually cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming scenario after decades of slow development and minimized spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research examined at the end of in 2015 that Euro location financial efficiency has been ‘controlled’ because around 2018, showing ‘multifaceted challenges of energy dependency, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and moving global trade characteristics’.

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

This stays vulnerable, nevertheless, with citizens progressively agitated by the perceived pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of budget-friendly accommodation 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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