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Attack On Property Rights
A British MP's latest wheeze aimed at inconveniencing the "super-rich" is dressed up as a means of safeguarding rural homes for key workers.
Second home owners in picturesque corners of Britain have become the latest targets of London's ire (along with "middle class wine drinkers"). Even modest properties in some parts of Devon and Cornwall easily reach the £500,000 mark, putting them well out of the reach of local teachers and tradesmen.
Rural communities are dying, runs the complaint, as thousands of second homes remain unoccupied for much of the year and locals of modest means are forced to move elsewhere, priced out of their home market.
It's a matter which unites left and right. The admirable Countryside Alliance wants to preserve rural communities, while left-leaning protestors argue that the evils of property speculation are laying waste to the fabric of the traditional villages.
Of course, few complain when they get to sell granny's leaky old cottage to a London stockbroker for a million quid - but when their children and grandchildren want to live and work in their home village, the property boom takes on a double edge.
How best to deal with this problem? The latest scheme, put forward by a Cornish MP as part of a review of rural life, is to make local authorities decide if a sale can go ahead: Second home owners would need to appeal to councils for planning permission to own their property. In areas of great need, it is presumed that the council would refuse the request. The hedge fund manager would be sent packing back to South Ken, while the house would then be occupied by some horny-handed son of the soil.
All very nice, but this is not an attack on the rich interloper, who can in any case buy a chateau in the Périgord for the same price as a cottage in Devon. It's an assault on the basic property rights of the owner of the available house.
If he can offer it on the free market, he stands to make a million. If, instead, the council says he can only sell his house to a local, the price will fall correspondingly - perhaps to a quarter, or even a tenth of the market value.
And what's to stop the local buyer reselling the property for its full value at a later date?
This scheme will never solve the rural property crisis. House owners would prefer to keep their houses off the market until a more sensible government is in place, rather than lose hundreds of thousands of pounds to this Stalinist fraud.
This abuse of property rights - the right to dispose of your property when and how you like - would never last a reading in the European Court of Human Rights.
One wise man argued that the better protected property rights are, the more democratic and free the nation. Bashing the multiple-home "super rich" has become a national pastime since recession started looming in June last year, but Britons had better watch what they wish for.
