Britain is on course to ending up being a ‘second tier’ European nation like Spain or Italy due to economic decrease and a weak military that weakens its effectiveness to allies, a professional has cautioned.

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

The stark assessment weighed that succeeding government failures in regulation and drawing in investment had triggered Britain to miss out on 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 wrote in The Henry Jackson Society’s newest report, Strategic Prosperity: The Case for Economic Growth as a National Security Priority.

The report evaluates that Britain is now on track to fall back Poland in terms of per capita earnings by 2030, which the main European country’s military will quickly exceed the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and equipment on the present trajectory.

‘The problem is that once we are downgraded to a 2nd tier middle power, it’s going to be virtually impossible to return. Nations do not return from this,’ Dr Ibrahim informed 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 difficult decisions 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 throughout a live fire variety on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim welcomed the federal government’s decision to increase defence costs 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 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 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 deployment at scale.’

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

‘There are 230 brigades in Ukraine today, Russian and Ukrainian. Not a single European nation 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 essentially outsourcing security to the United States and NATO,’ he told MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting tiredness of offering 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 actually lead European defence. But none of the European countries are.’

Slowed defence costs and patterns of low efficiency are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘failing to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based international 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 institutions once ‘protected’ by the U.S., Britain is responding by hurting the last vestiges of its military might and financial power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘seems to be making increasingly expensive 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 in between the U.K. and Mauritius were begun by the Tories in 2022, but an agreement was announced 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. federal government refers to as being characterised by fantastic power competition’.

Calls for the U.K. to provide reparations for its historic role in the slave trade were rekindled also in October in 2015, though Sir Keir Starmer stated ahead of a conference of Commonwealth countries that reparations would not be on the agenda.

An Opposition 2 primary 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 risk.

‘We understand soldiers and missiles however stop working to fully conceive of the risk that having no alternative to China’s supply chains might have on our capability to react to military hostility.’

He recommended a new security design to ‘enhance the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based upon a rethink of migratory policy and risk evaluation, access to unusual earth minerals in a market controlled by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and self-reliance by means of investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on nuclear energy.

‘Without immediate policy modifications to reignite growth, Britain will become a reduced power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign browbeating,’ the Foreign Policy columnist stated.

‘As global economic competition magnifies, the U.K. should decide whether to accept a strong growth program or resign itself to permanent decline.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero might be admirable, however the pursuit will inhibit development and obscure tactical objectives, he cautioned.

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

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

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

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

Britain did present a new financing model for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists including Labour politicians had actually insisted was key to discovering the cash for pricey plant-building projects.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation company, has actually been heralded for its grants for little energy-producing companies in your home, business owners have actually alerted a broader culture of ‘risk hostility’ in the U.K. suppresses financial 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 image of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has consistently failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian threat’, permitting 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 ‘advantages tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The hazard to this order … has actually established partly due to the fact that of the absence of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to deliberate foreign attempts to overturn the recognition of the real hiding hazard they present.’

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

But Dr Ibrahim warned that this is inadequate. He prompted a top-down reform of ‘essentially our entire 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 use up enormous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing considerably,’ he told MailOnline.

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

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

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

File image. Britain’s economic stagnancy could see it quickly 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 spend for its own defence has cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s dire scenario after decades of sluggish growth and decreased costs.

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro location economic efficiency has actually been ‘suppressed’ because around 2018, highlighting ‘complex obstacles of energy reliance, producing vulnerabilities, and moving international trade dynamics’.

There stay profound discrepancies in between European economies