Four maps Westminster doesn't want you to see.

And which reveal a deeper problem with the social contract.

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Here’s an astonishing story you might have missed. The First Lady of Sierra Leone has finally lost her council flat in London.

Yes, you read that right.

When Fatima Jabbe-Bio is not living in a presidential mansion in Freetown — complete with tennis courts, a swimming pool, and helipad — the wife of Sierra Leone’s president was until recently renting out a council flat in Southwark.

Only now — after myself and others drew attention to the case — is Southwark Council finally repossessing the taxpayer-subsidised property.

Hopefully, the flat will now be handed to some of the British people who are among 1.3 million people waiting on the social housing waiting list, or one of the thousands of British military veterans who are currently homeless.

Either way, the story remains remarkable, not least because I think it symbolises a much bigger problem that is now rapidly undermining British society, and indeed Western nations, from within.

How on earth did we get to a point where large amounts of scarce social housing — which was built and paid for by earlier generations of British taxpayers for local British families — is no longer even going to British people at all?

Furthermore, how and why is this scarce social housing also going to those who clearly hold our own people in contempt?

The First Lady of Sierra Leone, who clearly saw no problem profiting at the British people’s expense, is by no means the only example.

In recent years, there have been a string of social housing scandals that were hushed up by the British state.

The alleged Hamas chief living in a council house in Barnet.

The terrorist preacher Abu Hamza who lived in a council house in Shepherd’s Bush.

The family of an ISIS leader living in a council flat in Slough.

The al-Qaeda preacher — who probably radicalised ‘Jihadi John’ — living in a large, taxpayer-funded house in London, while also claiming many other welfare benefits.

And the estimated 15,000 council homes that have been given to refugees in Britain since 2020 alone — many of whom no doubt entered the country illegally.

Clearly, not everybody who lives in social housing is actively trying to harm the British people, or take them for a ride.

But if you ever wanted a textbook example of ‘suicidal empathy’ — of what happens when politicians become so obsessed with showing empathy to outsiders that they end up destroying their own nations from within — then the British state’s approach to distributing taxpayer-funded social housing would be high up on the list.

Which is perhaps why, this week, Nigel Farage and Reform UK stepped directly into this intensifying debate by announcing that, under a Reform government, foreign nationals would no longer be entitled to social housing.

Those who are currently in social housing would have three months to find alternative private rented accommodation, while British citizens who have deep local roots, British military veterans, and victims of domestic abuse would be prioritised.

Predictably, the Left has erupted.

All the usual words — “racist”, “xenophobic”, “reactionary” — have been thrown at Reform’s policy this week.

But what many of these people have not bothered to dwell on is the reality of what is now actually unfolding in this country.

A reality that’s reflected in four maps I want to show you, and which I suspect the politicians in Westminster would rather you not see at all.

Because whatever your personal view of the policy, Reform UK, or even Nigel Farage, what I’m about to show you does reveal something extraordinary.

First, consider just a few of the headline figures in Britain today.

In major cities such as Birmingham, according to official data, at least one-third of all taxpayer-subsidised social housing tenants were born outside of Britain, of which less than half are currently working.

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In London, it’s 48 per cent. In Slough, it’s 41 per cent. In Leicester, it’s nearly 40 per cent. In Luton, it’s 38 per cent. In Manchester, it’s 32 per cent. In Coventry, it’s 31 per cent. I could go on. And on.

Across a large swathe of the country, in many of our major cities and towns, it’s now entirely commonplace for at least one-third of all social housing tenants to have been born somewhere else in the world.

Now look closer.

In some areas within these major urban areas the figures absolutely skyrocket, revealing a British state that now appears to be working overtime to prioritise people who only arrived relatively recently and at the expense of the hardworking, British majority whose families have been on these islands, contributing, for generations.

Look, for example, at our capital city.

As Nigel Farage points out in his recent essay, in London close to 50 per cent of people who head families that are residing in social housing were born overseas, benefiting from more than £3.5 billion in rent discounts each year.

In Northwick Park, close to Wembley, it’s 76 per cent. In parts of Southall, it’s over 75 per cent. In Knightsbridge and Belgravia, it’s more than two-thirds. In Victoria, it’s close to 60 per cent. In Westminster, it’s more than half.

Many young British people, many British professionals, many British workers, all of whom are contributing to the economy, and whose ancestors also paid in to the collective pot, would no doubt love to live in these kinds of areas in central London.

But they will simply never be offered the chance to do so. They will simply never be prioritised by our current political class.

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Or look at Southwark, the area of London that handed Fatima Jabbe-Bio a council flat.

In that part of London, like countless other areas in the capital city, between 47 and 55 per cent of all tenants who have been given discounted social housing in prime real estate areas were not born in Britain.

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And we can see this, too, across a growing number of towns that are scattered across the Midlands and northern England, where it’s likewise not uncommon to find the vast majority of people in taxpayer-funded social housing were born abroad.

Such as Alexandra Park in Oldham (68 per cent), parts of Bradford (58 per cent), parts of Leeds (62 per cent), Blackburn (48 per cent), and many, many others.

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On one level, what all this reveals is the sheer scale of demographic change that has swept through Britain’s towns and cities over the last generation, with not just our major cities but medium and small towns now also witnessing these seismic shifts.

In these areas and others, when it comes to the allocation of scarce social housing native Brits are very clearly and very publicly being displaced and looked past.

But what it also raises is another fundamental question that, so far, pretty much everybody in Westminster has spent the last few decades refusing to answer.

Who is social housing for?

Keir Starmer, Members of Parliament, woke celebrities, academics, and unelected bureaucrats all talk endlessly about “fairness” and “avoiding division”.

Yet there is nothing more unfair and divisive than forcing your own people, including British families and veterans, to wait years for a home while their elected representatives prioritise people who were born somewhere else in the world, who often only arrived very recently, and even when given a home are often still not contributing to the economy at all.

There is nothing more unfair and divisive than forcing those same British taxpayers — amidst the most severe cost-of-living and housing crises in peacetime — to also spend billions of pounds subsidising that scarce social housing for others while also continuing to preside over record levels of immigration and claim with a straight face that there is no relationship between a rapidly expanding population and the glaring lack of available, affordable housing.

And there is also nothing more unfair and divisive than treating the suggestion that the British state should prioritise its own people as somehow tantamount to ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’, or the ‘far right’.

On the contrary, this is how successful, durable nation-states work. Citizens contribute to a shared moral and political community by working, paying taxes, respecting the rule of law, and contributing to the collective pot.

They have obligations to their fellow citizens and a responsibility to support the collective good — such as by voting at elections, working, contributing, looking after one another, and serving the nation.

This reciprocal relationship is not only why citizens become willing to support things like the welfare state — because it is underpinned by a deep sense of national solidarity and an awareness that those who have contributed will be prioritised — but is also why governments owe a special duty to their own people.

Because a nation is not just a hotel or set of legal documents. A nation is home — an ethical community of people who have an obligation to look after their own, and whose contribution and loyalty ensures that the nation-state can survive.

Once you lose sight of these obligations and loyalties, once you relegate your own people behind others, once you no longer distinguish between those who contribute and those who do not, then you are essentially tearing up the social contract that underpins the nation-state.

And when this happens, your own people will, inevitably, start to withdraw their support for welfare, stop contributing, and even leave the community altogether, having concluded that the social contract no longer makes any sense (as many Brits are now doing).

This precisely what many people in Britain will see when they look at these maps — a state that is simply no longer interested in upholding the social contract.

A nation that refuses to prioritise its own people when distributing scarce public goods is a nation that has forgotten what citizenship means. And a nation that forgets that will almost certainly, at some point, cease to be a stable nation altogether.

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As always, I welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Inner Circle and Paid subscribers for our weekly Live discussion on the Substack App.

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