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

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘2nd tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decline and a weak military that weakens its effectiveness to allies, a professional has alerted.

Research teacher Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE concluded in a damning new report that the U.K. has actually 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 stark assessment weighed that successive government failures in regulation and bring in 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 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 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 central European country’s military will quickly surpass the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and devices on the present trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are reduced to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be practically impossible to get back. Nations don’t 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 challenging choices 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 utilizes a radio to talk to Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery during a live fire variety 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 cautioned much deeper, systemic concerns threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a globally prominent power.

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

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

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

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

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue of supplying the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs 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 absolutely nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘failing to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based global order, stated Dr Ibrahim.

The previous 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 responding by hurting 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 been the source of much scrutiny.

Negotiations in between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, however an arrangement 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 worrying strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government describes as being characterised by excellent power competition’.

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 conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the agenda.

A Challenger 2 main fight tank of the British forces throughout 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 throughout an interview in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

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

‘We comprehend soldiers and rockets but fail to totally envisage the risk that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to react to military hostility.’

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

‘Without immediate policy modifications to reignite development, Britain will end up being a diminished power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign browbeating,’ the Diplomacy writer said.

‘As international economic competitors intensifies, the U.K. must decide whether to embrace a vibrant growth program or resign itself to irreparable decrease.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero may be laudable, however the pursuit will prevent growth and unknown strategic goals, he cautioned.

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

‘We are a country that has actually stopped working to purchase our financial, in our energy facilities. And we have considerable resources at our disposal.’

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

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development agency, has been declared for its grants for small energy-producing companies in your home, business owners have actually warned a larger culture of ‘risk aversion’ in the U.K. stifles financial investment.

In 2022, earnings for the poorest 14 million individuals 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 failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian threat’, allowing the trend of managed decline.

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

‘The risk to this order … has developed partly because of the absence of a robust will to defend it, owing in part to ponder foreign efforts to overturn the recognition of the real hiding hazard they position.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim cautioned that this is insufficient. He prompted 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 essentially bodies that take up enormous amounts of funds and they’ll just keep growing considerably,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget 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 courage from whomever is in power because it will make them undesirable.’

The report details suggestions in extreme tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a renewed concentrate on securing Britain’s function as a leader in modern markets, energy security, and global trade.

Vladimir Putin speaks with the governor of Arkhangelsk region Alexander Tsybulsky throughout their conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnancy could see it soon end up being a ‘second tier’ partner

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

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s insistence that Europe spend for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming situation after decades of sluggish development and decreased spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research examined at the end of in 2015 that Euro area financial efficiency has actually been ‘controlled’ given that around 2018, illustrating ‘multifaceted difficulties of energy dependence, making vulnerabilities, and shifting worldwide trade dynamics’.

There remain profound disparities in between European economies; German deindustrialisation has struck services hard and forced redundancies, while Spain has grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This remains vulnerable, however, with homeowners significantly agitated by the perceived 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 national security believe thank based in the UK.

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