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 economic decline and a weak armed force that undermines its effectiveness to allies, a professional has actually warned.

Research professor 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 might see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at current growth rates.

The stark assessment weighed that successive federal government failures in regulation and drawing in investment had caused Britain to miss 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 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 back Poland in terms of per capita income by 2030, which the central European nation’s military will soon exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the existing trajectory.

‘The problem is that when we are devalued to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be practically impossible to return. Nations do not return from this,’ Dr Ibrahim told MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be accelerated decline unless we nip this in the bud and have bold leaders who have the ability to make the challenging decisions right now.’

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

Dr Ibrahim invited the federal government’s choice to increase defence costs to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, however cautioned much deeper, systemic problems threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a globally influential power.

With a weakening industrial base, Britain’s usefulness to its allies is now ‘falling behind even second-tier European powers’, he alerted.

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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 unable to sustain implementation at scale.’

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

‘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 issue, of stopping working to purchase our military and essentially 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 remained in a premium position to actually lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

Slowed defence spending and patterns of low performance are absolutely nothing brand-new. But Britain is now likewise ‘failing to change’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based global order, said Dr Ibrahim.

The previous consultant to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review noted in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the organizations once ‘secured’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by harming the last vestiges of its military may and financial power.

The U.K., he said, ‘appears to be making increasingly pricey gestures’ like the ₤ ۹bn 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 analysis.

Negotiations in between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, but a contract 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 move demonstrates worrying strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. government refers to as being characterised by terrific power competitors’.

Calls for the U.K. to offer reparations for its historic role in the servant trade were rekindled likewise in October in 2015, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a conference of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the agenda.

A Challenger 2 main fight 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 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 threat.

‘We understand soldiers and missiles but fail to completely envisage the risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains may have on our capability to respond to military aggressiveness.’

He recommended a brand-new security model to ‘improve the U.K.’s tactical dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and hazard assessment, access to uncommon 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 atomic energy.

‘Without immediate policy changes to reignite development, Britain will end up being a lessened power, reliant on stronger allies and susceptible to foreign browbeating,’ the Foreign Policy columnist said.

‘As international economic competition heightens, the U.K. must choose whether to embrace a strong development agenda or resign itself to irreparable decline.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero may be admirable, but the pursuit will inhibit growth and obscure strategic goals, he cautioned.

‘I am not saying that the environment is not important. But we simply can not afford to do this.

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

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

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

Britain did present a brand-new funding design for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour political leaders had firmly insisted was crucial to discovering the cash for pricey plant-building tasks.

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

Britain has regularly stopped working to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian danger’, allowing the pattern of managed decrease.

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

‘The hazard to this order … has established partially because of the lack of a robust will to defend it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to subvert the recognition of the true hiding hazard they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim cautioned that this is not enough. He advised a top-down reform of ‘basically our whole 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 use 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 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 unpopular.’

The report describes suggestions in extreme tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a restored focus on securing Britain’s role as a leader in high-tech industries, energy security, and international trade.

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

File picture. Britain’s economic stagnancy might see it soon become a ‘2nd tier’ partner

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

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

The Centre for Economic Policy Research assessed at the end of last year that Euro location economic efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ since around 2018, highlighting ‘multifaceted difficulties of energy dependency, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and shifting worldwide trade characteristics’.

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

This stays delicate, nevertheless, with homeowners increasingly agitated by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are priced out of cost effective lodging and trapped in low paying seasonal jobs.

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

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