Wednesday 21 October 2015

Selling England by the pound.

Well, more like by the acre. Private Eye has mapped all the bits of the UK bought by offshore companies in the last nine years, to which you'd have to add all the land bought by foreign individuals. Still, well worth a look.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

So much for sovereignty.

Mark Wadsworth said...

That's all well and good, but no matter how many little dots there are on that map, it is only a tiny percentage of all 30 million odd separate land titles in the UK.

Sackerson said...

A lot can leak out through a little hole.

Antisthenes said...

What is with this loathing of Johnny foreigner buying up bits of the UK nobody created when GB when it was rich was doing they very same thing to Johnny foreigner in spades. It was only our decline that made us sell them all off.

Economically it has few downsides and both sides are winners from it. Stop carping about others creating wealth. Channel your envy into creating better things for yourselves from your own endeavours. After all that is all Johnny foreigner is doing; spotting an opportunity and taking it.

Bayard said...

Anti, "offshore company" doesn't necessarily equal "foreigner". I know, it's probably a misleading title, but I couldn't resist it.

Antisthenes said...

Sorry I have a habit of doing that getting the wrong end of the stick.

As for offshore companies instinctively I would say that they are a bad thing but often quickly made assumptions based purely on emotive feels which we are very much guilty of most of the time lead us to wrong conclusions.

Currently the law allows it and if that was deliberate then I would want to know the reasons why it is and if they were sensible ones then I will have no problem with it. If it is just a loophole then again I would need to hear compelling reasons not indignant ones for closing that loophole.

We judge with our heart and not our head or for other axe to grind reasons then we do so at our peril. If we do in the end we end up with something even worse than that we perceive to be bad and have replaced.