Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are strong-arming Britain into a deadly paralysis

The stark reality for our nation is that economic mismanagement, geopolitical miscalculations and divisive social and migration policy threaten to demote the United Kingdom to second-tier status in Europe.

Britain faces an unprecedented decline, characterised by economic stagnation, military frailty, and outmoded foreign policies. If action isn’t taken swiftly, Britain’s standing on the global stage will be irreversibly lost.

New analysis by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) points to projections that countries like Poland could surpass the UK in GDP per capita within the next five years.

Real per capita in the UK was $58,270 in 2023 while Poland’s was $46,450, according to the latest 2023 World Bank Data. If the UK keeps growing at 0.5%, as we have for the last decade (although Reeves’ budget pushed growth down to just 0.1%), while Poland keeps growing at its 10-year average of 4.3% 3 , we will be overtaken before January 2030.

Poland already has the larger Army. Our military leaders are clear with us that we could only logistically sustain a war with for a couple of months. With limited deployability and a preference for a legalistic foreign policy of “decolonisation” (read: handing military assets to friends of ), our influence and usefulness to our allies, particularly to America, may soon lie in tatters.

Economic decline is at the heart of this. The UK’s growth has fallen to 0.1% and our debt threatens to spiral out of control. We have some of the highest costs in the world, restrictive planning laws, and punitive taxation. These have been crippling our ability to compete in critical industries such as defence development and artificial intelligence for years, as they require affordable power and capital ready to invest.

Thanks to Labour’s doubling down on crippling net-zero policies, Britain will continue to have neither. The business confidence index has therefore fallen from 14.4 under Sunak to 0.2 under Starmer.

Labour’s idea that we can tax ourselves into prosperity is clearly for the birds. The National Insurance rise – effectively a tax on jobs – hasn’t even kicked in yet.

This week’s revelations in Munich over show the writing on the wall. It has upended many of Britain’s lazy assumptions. Without Trump as a guarantor, Europe now must learn to fend for itself. We need to spend at least 2.5% of GDP on defence, but quite frankly, it is not possible if we’re neither growing the economy nor cutting spending.

The loss of economic dynamism is not just an internal crisis but a threat to our most vital international alliances. The UK-US special relationship is under strain as we become increasingly impotent amidst growing global threats. Labour cozying up to China, with David Lammy and Rachel Reeves making trade trips to Beijing, weakens our credibility with our most important ally – the United States. Much has been said about the Chagos Islands and Starmer’s shocking decision to hand these, along with £9 billion, to Mauritius, a close friend of China, against the wishes of the Chagossians and in defiance of all strategic logic.

Yet the smaller decisions are equally concerning. In their crusade for net zero, Starmer and Miliband are set to allow the Chinese to build wind turbines across the North Sea, a move needlessly compromising our energy infrastructure to a country that already has attempted to spy on government and parliament itself.

The targets for Reeves are clear. She must throw out the pernicious anti-wealth ideology that drove the tax raid on farmers and capital gains, and the radical environmentalism that leads to unaffordable energy and £100m bat sheds. She needs to reverse the exploding benefits bill by getting British workers off sickness benefits instead of relying on mass migration to temporarily plug the numbers.

For Lammy, as Foreign Secretary, the targets are even clearer. Britain must prioritise itself and its free, democratic allies over the lawyer friends of the Prime Minister. Scandalous talks of reparations should be treated as what they really are – hostile attempts from Caribbean nations to take advantage of a radically anti-British Foreign Secretary and a confused, weak and moralising Prime Minister.

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has her work cut out to fix an immigration system designed by the Treasury based on bad modelling, failing to consider the calamitous effects on a housing market constrained by planning law, on public services, and underestimating the number of economic dependents migrants would bring with them. Asylum law, as the HJS report points out, leads to enormous costs, including £5.4bn a year just on migrant housing alone. That’s enough to take a penny off the 20p basic rate of income tax for everyone in the UK.

Nonetheless, the UK has many advantages. We are more closely integrated into the US military and intelligence at the highest level than any other nation. Moving away from Labour’s broken economic, foreign and migration policy will allow us to reinvest in our military and foreign influence. Changing the tax system to make ourselves as attractive as possible for start-ups and foreign capital will allow us to play to our strengths in technology, finance and education. The solution is as obvious as it is simple. If we squander this chance, Britain will become irrelevant.