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 economic decrease and a weak military that weakens its usefulness to allies, a specialist has actually warned.

Research teacher 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 misguided policies that could see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at existing growth rates.

The stark evaluation weighed that successive government failures in guideline and attracting financial investment had actually caused Britain to lose out on the ‘markets of the future’ courted by established 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 composed in The Henry Jackson Society’s latest report, Strategic Prosperity: The Case for Economic Growth as a National Security Priority.

The report assesses that Britain is now on track to fall behind Poland in regards to per capita income by 2030, which the central European country’s armed force will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the existing trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are downgraded to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be virtually impossible to get back. Nations do not 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 bold leaders who have the ability to make the challenging 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 utilizes a radio to speak to Archer teams from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the government’s choice to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, however cautioned much deeper, systemic issues threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a worldwide 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. predicted to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, however also a smaller army and one that is unable to sustain deployment at scale.’

This is of specific issue at a time of heightened geopolitical stress, with Britain pegged to be amongst the leading forces in Europe’s quick 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 simply Starmer’s issue, of stopping working to buy our military and essentially outsourcing security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue of providing the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs to stand on its own and the U.K. would have remained in a premium position to in fact lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

Slowed defence costs and patterns of low performance are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘failing to change’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based international 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 organizations when ‘secured’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by hurting the last vestiges of its military may and financial power.

The U.K., he said, ‘seems to be making significantly 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 started by the Tories in 2022, but a contract was revealed 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 move shows worrying strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government describes as being characterised by great power competitors’.

Calls for the U.K. to supply reparations for its historical role in the servant trade were rekindled likewise in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the program.

A Challenger 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 during an interview in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

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

‘We comprehend soldiers and rockets however stop working to fully conceive of the threat that having no alternative to China’s supply chains may have on our ability to react to military aggressiveness.’

He suggested a new security design to ‘enhance the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and danger evaluation, access to unusual 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 immediate policy changes to reignite growth, Britain will become a lessened power, reliant on stronger allies and susceptible to foreign coercion,’ the Diplomacy writer stated.

‘As global economic competitors intensifies, the U.K. should choose whether to accept a bold development agenda or resign itself to irreversible decline.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero might be admirable, but the pursuit will hinder development and unknown strategic goals, he warned.

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

‘We are a nation that has actually failed to invest in our economic, in our energy facilities. And we have considerable resources at our disposal.’

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

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development company, has been declared for its grants for small energy-producing companies in the house, entrepreneurs have alerted a larger culture of ‘danger hostility’ in the U.K. suppresses 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 regularly failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian danger’, permitting the pattern of handled decline.

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

‘The risk to this order … has established partly because of the lack of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to ponder foreign efforts to subvert the acknowledgment of the real prowling danger they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim alerted that this is inadequate. He advised 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 basically bodies that take up immense quantities of funds and they’ll just keep growing considerably,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget plan and it will actually not make much of a dent. So all of this will require basic reform and will take a great deal of nerve from whomever is in power since it will make them undesirable.’

The report lays out suggestions in extreme tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed focus on protecting Britain’s role as a leader in state-of-the-art industries, energy security, and worldwide trade.

Vladimir Putin talks with the governor of Arkhangelsk area Alexander Tsybulsky throughout their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnation might see it soon end up being a ‘2nd 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 persistence that Europe spend for its own defence has actually cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire scenario after years of sluggish development and reduced costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro location financial efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ given that around 2018, showing ‘multifaceted difficulties of energy dependence, producing vulnerabilities, and shifting global trade dynamics’.

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

This remains fragile, nevertheless, with citizens significantly agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of affordable lodging and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

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

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