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 usefulness to allies, a professional has alerted.

Research professor Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE concluded in a damning new report that the U.K. has actually been paralysed by low investment, high tax and misdirected policies that might see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at present development rates.

The plain evaluation weighed that succeeding federal government failures in policy and drawing in investment had actually caused Britain to miss 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 composed 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 regards to per capita income by 2030, and that the central European nation’s armed force will soon go beyond the U.K.’s along lines of both workforce and equipment on the existing trajectory.

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

‘This is going to be sped up decline unless we nip this in the bud and have strong leaders who are able 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 uses a radio to speak to Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the government’s choice to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but warned much deeper, systemic problems 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 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, but also a smaller sized army and one that is not able to sustain release at scale.’

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

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

‘This is an enormous oversight on the part of subsequent governments, not just Starmer’s problem, of stopping working to invest in our military and basically contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting tiredness of offering the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs to base 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 countries are.’

Slowed defence spending and patterns of low productivity are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s shock to the rules-based global order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The previous advisor to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the institutions once by the U.S., Britain is reacting by damaging the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he said, ‘seems to be making significantly 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 actually been the source of much scrutiny.

Negotiations between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, however an agreement was revealed by the Labour government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security believe thank cautioned at the time that ‘the move demonstrates fretting tactical ineptitude in a world that the U.K. federal government refers to as being characterised by excellent power competitors’.

Calls for the U.K. to supply reparations for its historic function in the slave trade were revived likewise in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the program.

An Opposition 2 main battle 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 during a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

Dr Ibhramin assessed 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 missiles however stop working to totally envisage the risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our ability to respond to military aggression.’

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

‘Without instant policy modifications to reignite growth, Britain will end up being a lessened power, reliant on more powerful allies and vulnerable to foreign browbeating,’ the Foreign Policy writer said.

‘As worldwide economic competition heightens, the U.K. needs to decide whether to accept a strong growth program or resign itself to irreparable decrease.’

Britain’s commitment to the idea of Net Zero may be laudable, but the pursuit will inhibit development and odd strategic goals, he warned.

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

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

Nuclear power, including making use of little modular reactors, could be an advantage for the British economy and energy self-reliance.

‘But we have actually failed to commercialise them and undoubtedly that’s going to take a substantial quantity of time.’

Britain did present a new funding model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour political leaders had insisted was crucial to finding the money for pricey plant-building jobs.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development firm, has actually been heralded for its grants for little energy-producing companies in your home, business owners have warned a broader culture of ‘threat aversion’ in the U.K. stifles 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 photo of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has actually consistently failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian risk’, permitting the pattern of managed decrease.

But the resurgence of autocracies on the world phase risks further weakening the rules-based worldwide order from which Britain ‘advantages tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The danger to this order … has established partly due to the fact that of the lack of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the acknowledgment 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 method towards waking Britain as much as the seriousness of buying defence.

But Dr Ibrahim alerted 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 essentially bodies that use up immense quantities of funds and they’ll just keep growing significantly,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘You might double the NHS budget and it will really not make much of a damage. So all of this will require basic reform and will take a lot of courage from whomever is in power because it will make them out of favor.’

The report details recommendations in radical tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a renewed focus on protecting Britain’s role as a leader in modern industries, energy security, and international trade.

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

File image. Britain’s financial stagnation might see it soon become a ‘second tier’ partner

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

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe pay for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire scenario after decades of sluggish growth and decreased spending.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro location financial efficiency has actually been ‘subdued’ since around 2018, showing ‘diverse difficulties of energy dependency, producing vulnerabilities, and shifting global trade characteristics’.

There stay extensive inconsistencies between European economies; German deindustrialisation has actually hit organizations hard and forced redundancies, while Spain has actually grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This stays delicate, however, with residents increasingly upset by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of affordable accommodation and trapped 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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