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Comment by Asbostos | Hacker News Reader

Why does this matter? Somebody's going to own the land. If English people don't want foreign companies owning it, then they should make that illegal. If they don't have a stranglehold on who must pay tax to the UK government then they should tax something else they they do have control over instead. If these things have side effects that are even worse then welcome to the free market - you have to make yourself attractive to taxpayers if you want them to come and pay tax.

Australian have similar concerns. They don't like rich foreigners buying their property. Yet somehow they still allow it.

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> Why does this matter? Somebody's going to own the land.

If the demand is coming from a rich external country, it can create a situation where citizens can't afford property. For your others points, if the skin color of external people isn't white, creating any new common sense legislation to protect the interests of citizens can be difficult due to immediate cries of racism (which it isn't of course as it would apply to all non-citizens equally, but lets not let facts get in the way).

I don't think the concern is about foreign ownership per se, but rather the lack of transparency associated with the offshore companies, particularly in relation to potential tax (Stamp Duty) avoidance and money laundering[0].

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/25/london-housin...

agreed, I looked around the area I live in Kent and it looks like people buying a house "tax efficiently" ahem, via companies in the Channel islands, rather than oligarchs buying up swathes of the town.

It matters because when a country (i)is busy trying to balance its budget in a time of relatively little economic growth and (ii)has experienced a sustained and relatively rapid growth in land values over a long period of time, taxing some of that property price appreciation is sensible economic policy, and often-opaque[1] tax-evading shell companies are a natural target for slapping with a property tax if they want to continue holding onto all that prime real estate.

[1]probably a sizeable portion of these apparently foreign entities are actually holding companies for Britons and UK registered companies.

Because people end up having to spend all their labour derived income on economic rent extraction by a financial elite.

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