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

Britain is on course to ending up being a ‘2nd tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decline and a weak armed force that weakens its effectiveness to allies, a professional has cautioned.

Research professor 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 current development rates.

The stark assessment weighed that succeeding government failures in regulation and attracting financial investment had triggered Britain to lose 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 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 back Poland in terms of per capita earnings by 2030, and that the main European country’s armed force will soon exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and devices on the present trajectory.

‘The problem is that as soon as we are devalued to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be virtually impossible to return. Nations don’t come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim told MailOnline today.

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

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

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the federal government’s decision 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 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 warned.

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‘Not only is the U.K. anticipated to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, but likewise a smaller sized army and one that is not able to sustain release at scale.’

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

‘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 just Starmer’s problem, of stopping working to purchase our military and basically contracting out 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 has 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 absolutely nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘failing to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based international order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The previous consultant to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the institutions when ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by hurting the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘appears to be making increasingly pricey 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 between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, but an arrangement was announced by the Labour federal government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security believe thank cautioned at the time that ‘the relocation demonstrates fretting strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government describes as being characterised by fantastic power competition’.

Require the U.K. to offer reparations for its historic function in the servant trade were rekindled also in October in 2015, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the program.

An Opposition 2 primary battle tank of the British forces during 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 a press conference 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 danger.

‘We understand soldiers and missiles but stop working to fully envisage the threat that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our ability to react to military aggressiveness.’

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

‘Without immediate policy modifications to reignite growth, Britain will become a lessened power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign coercion,’ the Foreign Policy columnist said.

‘As global economic competitors heightens, the U.K. should decide whether to embrace a strong growth agenda or resign itself to irreparable decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero might be laudable, but the pursuit will hinder development and obscure tactical goals, he cautioned.

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

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

Nuclear power, consisting of using small modular reactors, could be an advantage for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has actually been heralded for its grants for little energy-producing companies in your home, entrepreneurs have warned a wider culture of ‘threat aversion’ in the U.K. suppresses financial investment.

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million individuals fell 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 consistently failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian risk’, allowing the trend of handled decline.

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

‘The risk to this order … has actually established partially due to the fact that of the lack of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to ponder foreign efforts to subvert the acknowledgment of the true lurking hazard they present.’

The Trump administration’s warning to NATO allies in Europe that they will need to do their own bidding has gone some method towards waking Britain as much as the seriousness of investing in defence.

But Dr Ibrahim warned that this is inadequate. 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 amounts of funds and they’ll just keep growing substantially,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the plan and it will actually not make much of a damage. So all of this will require basic reform and will take a great deal of courage from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them out of favor.’

The report outlines suggestions in extreme tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a restored focus on securing Britain’s function as a leader in modern industries, energy security, and global trade.

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

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnancy might see it quickly become a ‘second 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 back. The Trump administration’s insistence 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 minimized costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research assessed at the end of last year that Euro area financial efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ because around 2018, illustrating ‘multifaceted difficulties of energy dependency, producing vulnerabilities, and moving worldwide trade dynamics’.

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

This stays fragile, nevertheless, with residents progressively agitated by the perceived pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of budget friendly accommodation and trapped in low paying seasonal jobs.

The Henry Jackson Society is a diplomacy and national security believe thank based in the UK.

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