Why does the first lady of Sierra Leone have a council flat in London?

Most people would have clicked on the BBC’s recent interview with Fatima Bio expecting to be engrossed in her fascinating life story: she escaped child marriage, sought asylum in the UK and ended up as the first lady of Sierra Leone. Unfortunately for Bio, if the social-media reaction is anything to go by, most readers appear to have finished the interview feeling more anger than admiration. Why? Because several paragraphs in, we learn that this multimillionaire wife of a foreign head of state holds the tenancy to a council flat in London.

This revelation spills out in what was supposed to be an inspiring interview as part of the corporation’s ‘Global Women’ series. To be fair, Bio has certainly had a trying life: she was effectively sold off by her father to a much older man when she was 13, before escaping to London in 1996 at age 16. She slogged away in film and modelling, moving into a council flat in Southwark in 2007. She lived there until 2018, when she returned to Sierra Leone with her husband and the country’s newly elected president, Julius Maada Bio. She told the BBC that her children now live in her Southwark flat.

The revelation has prompted uproar on social media, and rightly so. Bio doesn’t live in London any more, but in a sumptuous palace in Freetown. She seems to possess an extensive property portfolio in Africa. And yet she is still somehow able to hold on to a property whose rents are subsidised by the British taxpayer. Meanwhile, London’s social-housing waiting list is at a 10-year high.

The first lady’s Southwark council flat confirms that the UK’s welfare state is fundamentally broken, especially when it comes to social housing. Bizarrely, this African property magnate is arguably not even the least deserving recipient of British welfare. In October 2023, The Times revealed that Muhammad Qassem Sawalha – a high-ranking member of Hamas – owns a two-storey council house with a garden in north London, which he bought with the help of a £112,000 ‘right to buy’ discount from Barnet Council. He has been kicking his heels up there since 2003, shortly after he stole into the UK on a relative’s passport, having evaded authorities in Israel. According to the US State Department, he continued to work for Hamas, laundering money in support of its terrorist activities in Gaza and the West Bank.

Of course, not everyone in a council flat is a foreign president’s wife or a wanted Islamist terrorist. But a staggering proportion of London’s social housing is used to subsidise mass, low-skilled migration. Across the capital, nearly half of social housing – 48 per cent – is occupied by a head of household who wasn’t born in the UK, well above the national average of 19 per cent. In areas like Westminster, this is as high as 59 per cent.

More grating still, 35 per cent of those heads of household who are foreign-born and in social housing in London are either unemployed or are economically inactive. In other words, a non-negligible proportion of the social housing in the most prosperous, expensive areas in the country is allocated to those who are not from the UK and who do not contribute to the UK.

Britain’s international welfare state has turned us into a global laughing stock.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.