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

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘second tier’ European nation like Spain or Italy due to financial decrease and a weak armed force that weakens its effectiveness to allies, a specialist has alerted.

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 development rates.

The stark assessment weighed that successive government failures in regulation and attracting investment had actually caused Britain to miss 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 2 months,’ he composed in The Henry Jackson Society’s most current 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, and that the central European nation’s military will soon surpass the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and devices on the existing trajectory.

‘The concern is that as soon as we are downgraded to a second tier middle power, it’s going to be virtually difficult to get back. Nations do not return from this,’ Dr Ibrahim told MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be sped up decrease unless we nip this in the bud and have vibrant leaders who have the ability to make the challenging decisions 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 with Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, during Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the government’s choice to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but alerted 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 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, however likewise a smaller sized army and one that is not able to sustain implementation at scale.’

This is of particular issue at a time of heightened geopolitical tension, with Britain pegged to be among the leading forces in Europe’s rapid rearmament project.

‘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 an enormous oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not simply Starmer’s problem, 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 tiredness of providing 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 really lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

Slowed defence spending and patterns of low performance are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘failing to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based worldwide 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 institutions when ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is reacting by damaging the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘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 actually been the source of much examination.

Negotiations in between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, but a contract was announced by the Labour government last October.

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

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

A Challenger 2 primary fight 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 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 understand soldiers and missiles but fail to fully conceive of the threat that having no option to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to react to military hostility.’

He suggested a brand-new security design to ‘enhance the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based on a rethink of and risk evaluation, access to uncommon earth minerals in a market dominated by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and self-reliance via financial investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without instant policy changes to reignite development, Britain will become a diminished power, reliant on more powerful allies and vulnerable to foreign coercion,’ the Diplomacy writer said.

‘As global financial competitors heightens, the U.K. needs to choose whether to embrace a vibrant growth program or resign itself to permanent decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the concept of Net Zero may be laudable, but the pursuit will inhibit development and unknown tactical objectives, he warned.

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

‘We are a country that has stopped working to purchase our economic, in our energy infrastructure. And we have significant resources at our disposal.’

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

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

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

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has been declared for its grants for little energy-producing business in your home, business owners have warned a wider culture of ‘threat aversion’ 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 consistently stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian threat’, enabling the pattern of managed decrease.

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

‘The risk to this order … has actually established partly due to the fact that of the lack of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to deliberate foreign efforts to overturn the acknowledgment of the true prowling risk they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim cautioned that this is insufficient. He advised 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 basically bodies that take up immense amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing substantially,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS budget and it will actually not make much of a dent. So all of this will require basic reform and will take a lot of nerve from whomever is in power due to the fact that it will make them unpopular.’

The report lays out suggestions in radical tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a restored concentrate on protecting Britain’s role as a leader in state-of-the-art markets, energy security, and global trade.

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

File picture. Britain’s financial stagnation could see it soon become a ‘2nd tier’ partner

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

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s insistence that Europe pay for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming situation after years of slow development and lowered costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro location financial performance has actually been ‘suppressed’ because around 2018, illustrating ‘complex challenges of energy reliance, producing vulnerabilities, and shifting worldwide trade dynamics’.

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

This stays vulnerable, however, with residents significantly agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of budget friendly lodging and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

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

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