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 decline and a weak military that weakens its usefulness to allies, a specialist has 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 misdirected policies that might see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at present growth rates.

The stark assessment weighed that successive government failures in regulation and drawing in investment had 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 two 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 evaluates that Britain is now on track to fall behind Poland in terms of 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 present trajectory.

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

‘This is going to be accelerated decline unless we nip this in the bud and have strong leaders who have the ability to make the hard 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 speak with Archer crews from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery during a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the federal government’s choice to increase defence spending 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 an internationally influential power.

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

Why WW3 is already here … and how the UK will require to lead in America’s absence

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

This is of particular issue at a time of heightened geopolitical stress, with Britain pegged to be amongst 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 install a single heavy armoured brigade.’

‘This is an enormous oversight on the part of subsequent federal governments, not just Starmer’s issue, of failing 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 supplying 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 in fact lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

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

The former advisor to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review kept in mind in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the organizations as soon as ‘secured’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by hurting the last vestiges of its military might and economic power.

The U.K., he said, ‘seems to be making progressively pricey gestures’ like the ₤ 9bn handover of the tactical 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 an agreement was revealed by the Labour federal government last October.

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

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 nations that reparations would not be on the program.

A Challenger 2 main battle 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 throughout a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

Dr Ibhramin evaluated that the U.K. seems 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 risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains may have on our ability to react to military hostility.’

He suggested a new security model to ‘boost the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and hazard evaluation, access to uncommon earth minerals in a market dominated by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and independence through investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without instant policy modifications to reignite development, Britain will become a reduced power, reliant on stronger allies and susceptible to foreign coercion,’ the Foreign Policy columnist said.

‘As international financial competitors intensifies, the U.K. must choose whether to welcome a vibrant development agenda or resign itself to irreversible decline.’

Britain’s dedication to the idea of Net Zero might be admirable, however the pursuit will hinder development and odd strategic objectives, he alerted.

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

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

Nuclear power, including the usage of little modular reactors, might be a benefit for the British economy and energy independence.

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

Britain did introduce a new financing design for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour politicians had firmly insisted was essential to finding the money for costly plant-building projects.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development company, has been declared for its grants for little energy-producing business in your home, business owners have actually cautioned a larger culture of ‘danger aversion’ in the U.K. suppresses investment.

In 2022, earnings 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 actually regularly failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian hazard’, allowing the pattern of handled decrease.

But the renewal of autocracies on the world stage risks further undermining the rules-based worldwide order from which ‘benefits tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The hazard to this order … has established partly since of the absence of a robust will to protect it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the recognition of the real lurking danger they pose.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim warned that this is inadequate. He urged 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 basically bodies that take up enormous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing significantly,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS budget plan and it will actually not make much of a dent. So all of this will need fundamental reform and will take a lot of courage from whomever is in power because it will make them out of favor.’

The report lays out recommendations in extreme tax reform, pro-growth migration policies, and a restored focus on securing Britain’s function as a leader in high-tech markets, energy security, and global trade.

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

File picture. Britain’s financial stagnation could 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 great 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 situation after decades of sluggish growth and minimized costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research examined at the end of last year that Euro location economic performance has been ‘subdued’ considering that around 2018, showing ‘multifaceted challenges of energy dependency, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and shifting international trade dynamics’.

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

This remains fragile, nevertheless, with locals significantly upset by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of cost effective accommodation and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

The Henry Jackson Society is a foreign policy and national security think thank based in the UK.

SpainPoland