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

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘second tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decrease 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 growth rates.

The plain assessment weighed that successive federal government failures in policy and attracting financial investment had actually triggered Britain to miss out on out on the ‘industries 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 two 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 behind Poland in regards to per capita earnings by 2030, and that the central European country’s armed force will soon exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and devices on the present trajectory.

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

‘This is going to be sped up decline unless we nip this in the bud and have bold leaders who have the ability to make the difficult choices today.’

People pass boarded up stores 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 with 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 decision to increase defence costs to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but 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 usefulness to its allies is now ‘falling back even second-tier European powers’, he alerted.

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‘Not only 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 unable to sustain deployment at scale.’

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

‘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 a massive oversight on the part of subsequent federal governments, not simply Starmer’s issue, of stopping working to buy our military and basically contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue 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 actually lead European defence. But none of the European countries are.’

Slowed defence costs and patterns of low performance are nothing new. But Britain is now also ‘failing to change’ to the Trump administration’s shock 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 organizations when ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by damaging the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he said, ‘appears to be making progressively costly 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 in between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, however a contract was announced by the Labour government last October.

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

Calls for the U.K. to offer reparations for its historical function in the slave trade were rekindled also in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a meeting of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the program.

An Opposition 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 a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

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

‘We understand soldiers and rockets however fail to totally conceive of the risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our ability to react to military aggression.’

He suggested a new security design to ‘improve the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and risk assessment, access to rare earth minerals in a market dominated by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and independence by means of financial investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on atomic energy.

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

‘As worldwide economic competitors intensifies, the U.K. should choose whether to welcome a vibrant development agenda or resign itself to irreparable decline.’

Britain’s commitment to the idea of Net Zero may be admirable, but the pursuit will hinder development and unknown tactical goals, he cautioned.

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

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

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

‘But we have actually stopped working to commercialise them and certainly that’s going to take a substantial amount of time.’

Britain did introduce a new financing design for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists consisting of Labour political leaders had firmly insisted was key to discovering the cash for pricey plant-building projects.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development company, has been declared for its grants for little energy-producing companies at home, entrepreneurs have warned a larger culture of ‘threat 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 picture of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

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

But the resurgence of autocracies on the world stage threats further undermining the rules-based worldwide order from which Britain ‘benefits tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The threat to this order … has actually established partly since of the lack of a robust will to defend it, owing in part to ponder foreign efforts to overturn the acknowledgment of the true hiding threat they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim warned that this is inadequate. He prompted a top-down reform of ‘essentially 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 tremendous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the plan and it will really not make much of a damage. So all of this will require essential reform and will take a lot of courage from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them out of favor.’

The report details suggestions in radical tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed concentrate on protecting Britain’s function as a leader in state-of-the-art industries, energy security, and global trade.

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

File image. Britain’s economic stagnancy could see it quickly become a ‘2nd tier’ partner

Boarded-up stores 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 alarming situation after decades of sluggish development and decreased costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro area economic performance has actually been ‘suppressed’ since around 2018, highlighting ‘diverse challenges of energy dependency, making vulnerabilities, and moving worldwide trade characteristics’.

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

This remains fragile, however, with locals significantly agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of economical lodging and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

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

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