There is a vast amount of empty housing in this country. There are places where you can still buy a street of habitable homes for under £100k.

There is even a huge amount of vacant property in London, most of it owned by large landlords who don't need the incremental income and associated hassle, as just sitting on vacant properties waiting for the market to rise is enough.

No, the problem is not migrants placing demand on housing stock - it is those that are telling you these fabrications, and the completely broken housing market that they built while you and I were still suckling our mothers' teats.

If housing prices didn't rise then nobody would speculate. The foreign investments are just the symptom amplifying the original problem.

House prices rises are engineered. The latest bubble was created by offering huge tax breaks to landlords who would take on a mortgage on buy-to-let property.

This is easy money for the banks. They get most of the rental income in mortgage payments on a secured loan, while using the landlords as agents.

Foreign investors go where the bubbles are, and leave when the bubbles pop - which the London bubble is doing now.

Anyone who got in after 2008 made out like a bandit. But the party is over now, and we could be moving into hangover territory.

A house's primary purpose is to provide housing. Speculation by capital should be the lowest priority of anyone's concern while formulating a housing strategy.

Are you sure about that? What about the 1 million 'immigrants' that may all of a sudden have to leave the South of Spain, South of France, Ireland, etc.

It's a possibility that most of those British expats would have to come back to the UK. Most of them don't contribute much to those countries (other than spending as a pensioner, using the local health-care or having low qualified jobs).

I was talking to a Spanish friend of mine about the same thing. They thought the Spanish government would be quick to sign some kind of agreement to keep expats there, as many of them are pensioners and who function as a kind of cash injection into the Spanish economy.

Well, that's exactly what immigrants do in the UK (contribute more than they take by certain metrics [0]), ... but it doesn't stop the hostility in the media.

In Spain the perception is that Brits in the south are low qualified and old and that they have driven up the price of housing with their real estate speculation. When young, they are perceived as violent and disrespectful (probably the image created by short-term young binge-drinking tourists). It's certainly prejudice and first impressions, but that's the kind of irrational reactions you could see after a UK exit if Spain is struggling with its own economy.

I had heard the opposite statement, by the way, that they took more from the healthcare than they contributed ... but my google-fu failed me. Do you have a reference? (I don't know what the answer is either way)

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29910497

> Well, that's exactly what immigrants do in the UK (contribute more than they take by certain metrics [0]), ... but it doesn't stop the hostility in the media.

Counter-argument to that is that immigrants are simply crowding out British citizens (particularly young people, huge numbers of which are unemployed, or significantly underemployed) in the jobs market.

It is effectively jobs that make the contribution, whether they are filled by British citizens or EU nationals.

I'm from Spain and the argument I hear most is the opposite: they use expensive resources (health-care, which in Spain was universally free, with some limitations now after the cuts), pay no taxes, and put just a little bit of money on the bottom end of the economy (restaurants, service, overdevelopment of coast, etc.) This is in contrast with the kind of migrants that Spain exports, mostly productive tax-paying young people with university degrees. But we can't blame brits for this imbalance (and I'd always argue for more open borders not less). It's spaniards that since Franco times and still nowadays mistake easy money in tourism for development, and we hardly know what else to do nowadays.

No. Westminster government has been obsessed with London as a finance centre to the exclusion of the rest of the country. Leaving the EU will only make things worse in London.

Right. Not calculating with the price rise of _everything else_, especially food.

Well, house prices will go down as the economy completely tanks.

This is actually touted as a positive and a negative by the respective camps.

If the UK leaves the EU, then it may become even an even more attractive safe haven for foreign-capital investments, given that the whole point of BREXIT is the limit the reach of the EU authorities.

What it should do is give the UK government more control over if they want to make it more or less attractive. Which way they actually turn that lever if it comes down to it is very much an open question, and probably dependent on the results from the next election. Personally I'm not convinced the government would want to force out all that foreign capital and they may even be tempted to try to attract more.

Ultimately, the UK economy is very dependent on the housing bubble that has built up over the last decade.

Governments will be forced to do everything they can to keep it inflated, as if it pops, then the damage to the UK economy will be immeasurable.

I think it's a when, not an if. The only way to avoid a housing pop is to not blow a housing bubble, and it's a little late for that.

Yes, it'll cause pain. The longer they keep kicking the can down the road, the more people get sucked into buying at comically inflated prices on the assumption of ZIRP+HPI forever, the more painful it'll be. And the politics are slowly but surely changing, as the shut-out shift from an easily-ignorable minority to a near-majority.

How is that related?

true, but that will probably decrease wages too

It can be argued that the influx of "cheap" European migrants also keeps wages down. I think there's just too many variables to make an accurate prediction on housing prices or wages in either scenario.

The aim of BREXIT is to reduce immigration.

_IF_ that truly happens (and i seriously doubt that the "Borrises" are actually genuine about this) then local-uk wages will increase especially for skilled labour. Low wage producer's will simply be replaced by foreign imports, increasing the deficit unless of course the UK engages in a protectionist war with EU and EVERYONE else... (which it won't do).

> "The aim of BREXIT is to reduce immigration."

That's not the only aim.

The EU isn't truly democratic. The central body of power in the EU is the European Commission, and they're not democratically elected. The European Commission is the only group in the EU with the power to propose new legislation, no members of the European Parliament can do so.

I'll be voting to leave purely because I believe in democracy. I want elected representatives to have the power to represent the public, instead of being employed provide a veneer of respectability to a deeply flawed institution. I certainly won't be doing so over immigration as I believe immigration provides a net benefit to the UK.

The European Commission is elected by the heads of government of the EU nations. That is a whole lot more democratic than the house of Lords. It is actually as democratic as the manner in which the ministers in the UK are selected.

And in any case a whole lot easier to fix, than to leave for. Because to be honest the EU is more democratic than Westminster. After all Farage is in the EU parliament but not the UK one.

I'd be up for reforming the House of Lords as well, it's not an either/or situation.

The members of the European Commission are appointed by the heads of government from the member countries, however this matters very little when the mandate of the commissioners is clearly stated to be to represent the interests of Europe over the member countries. This isn't based on some biased media story, this comes directly from the horse's mouth. Check out this video from the European Commission's own YouTube channel...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWpgO1EPO_Y

From that video...

“The commission is a group of politicians, men and women, who meet every Wednesday in Brussels. We call them Commissioners. Together they form the government of Europe so to speak. They all have their own specific responsibilities and come from different countries. It is their role to defend the general interest of the European Union. When they take their oaths, they swear not to accept instructions from their own government.”

> "And in any case a whole lot easier to fix, than to leave for."

Perhaps I haven't made it clear. The only ones with power to reform the EU to make it more democratic are the EC, who would need to voluntarily give up their power to do so. How are you expecting that to pan out?

The UK isn't truly democratic. We're currently governed by a government that has a parliamentary majority despite only getting the support of 37% of voter.

With the way the UK electoral system is currently set up, the extreme results it produces makes me very happy to have the EU to moderate things.

What the last 20 years shows us is that UK governments have systematically tried to erode workers rights, remove social safety nets and strip away human rights, and it's largely been the EU that has held it in check.

I fear what we'll see in the case of an exit, with a government no longer reigned in by the EU treaties.

I agree that the UK needs electoral reform too. Ideally we'd get our own house in order before leaving the EU, but sadly if we vote to stay now we're unlikely to get the opportunity to vote again any time soon. The last UK referendum on the EU was in 1975. A vote to stay would probably mean staying in the EU for the bulk of my lifetime. If we want out, we should take the opportunity now.

As for the EU holding the UK in check, that's not quite accurate. It's true that the current Conservative government under Cameron has been damaging to public services, but that's not always been the case over the past 20 years. The Labour governments of Blair and Brown, for all their flaws, weren't pursuing the same type of wholesale undermining of public services. As an added bonus, if you want the policies of the Conservatives to stop, leaving the EU is likely to divide the Conservatives more than most parties, leading to a weaker party at the next general election.

Lastly, the EU does not always act to protect the people of the UK. As an example, take a look at what happened to the UK fishing industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy#Critic...

> I'll be voting to leave purely because I believe in democracy.

Without looking them up are you able to name all your local councillors?

I can't, but I did get a vote to pick them. I don't think your question speaks to the issue of the European commission being unelected.

It might not be the case for HN readers, but a lot of people who complain about the undemocratic nature of EU never vote in local elections.

Being interested in democracy means using your vote (or making a decision to abstain). Not bothering to vote is incompatible with the declared interest in democracy.

> Being interested in democracy means using your vote (or making a decision to abstain). Not bothering to vote is incompatible with the declared interest in democracy.

That's a strawman.

Plenty of people are not interested in all or part of a democratic system, but appreciate that it exists, and that it provides channels through which they can influence the way they are governed, if they deem it necessary.

No. Your point being?

A lot of people talk about how important democracy is, but when given an important bit of local democracy they show they're not involved.

Most people don't know the differences between the town council and their local authority; they have no idea who their councillors are; they might not even know which party has control.

So in other words you assumed that I didn't care about local democracy, and therefore implied I was a hypocrite.

For what it's worth, I voted in the local elections held this year, have voted in general elections, and have even met up with my local MP to discuss financial reform.

Furthermore, the idea of a representative democracy is that you elect people to work on your behalf. You do so because it's a full time job to stay abreast about all political issues. Even if I knew the names of all my local councillors, knowing their names doesn't give me any insight into the decisions being made. Most of us have a limited range of interests, I could tell you about political activity I'm interested in, would that satisfy you that I'm paying attention?

It is the elected European Parliament that passes the laws proposed by the Commission. Also the Parliament can ask the Commission to propose legislation.

> "It is the elected European Parliament that passes the laws proposed by the Commission."

All they can do is say yes or no. The European Commission can keep pushing forward the same legislation until they get a yes. Even referendums aren't enough to stop the EC, look at what happened with the vote on the European Constitution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu...

As you can see, the outcome of the referendums resulted in the European Constitution being rejected, so what the EC did was to take the main changes and push them through as amendments to existing agreements. This group of changes is known as the Lisbon Treaty.

> "Also the Parliament can ask the Commission to propose legislation."

That's not the same as having the power to propose legislation.

Anyone can ask the Commission to propose legislation, including lobbyists (there are over 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels, and you can be sure they're focused on influencing the ones with power to make changes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro... ) and the general public (through a European Citizens Initiative).

Just because you can ask for changes, doesn't mean the EC has to listen to you. As I've said in a different comment, the main priority of the EC is to work in the best interests of the EU, not the individual member countries.

> Just because you can ask for changes, doesn't mean the EC has to listen to you. As I've said in a different comment, the main priority of the EC is to work in the best interests of the EU, not the individual member countries.

The parliament has power of censure over the EC so in theory the EC could be made to listen.

I do agree with you that the EU is a democratic mess and share your concern about lobbyists.

I do however struggle to swallow Democracy as the main argument for Brexit when we have:

* a government in the UK elected by 25% of the possible electorate.

* parties gaining > 10% of the national vote having no representation in UK parliament

* an un-elected house of Lords

* a prime minister (who we technically don't elect and who can change at any time) who magically inherits powers from the queen to sign treaties and go to war

I look forward to the shining lights of the Brexit camp taking on these democratic deficits with the same enthusiasm in the future.

> "The parliament has power of censure over the EC so in theory the EC could be made to listen."

Could you explain further what you mean by this? I'm not familiar with the term 'power of censure'.

> "I look forward to the shining lights of the Brexit camp taking on these democratic deficits with the same enthusiasm in the future."

I don't care about what the 'shining lights' do, I know I'd gladly do so. First step in my opinion would be to renew the push towards proportional representation (and not the Alternative Vote cop out we were asked about before).

B. Motion of censure There has been provision for a motion of censure against the Commission (under what is now Article 234 TFEU) ever since the Treaty of Rome. Such a motion requires a two-thirds majority of the votes cast, representing a majority of Parliament’s component members. If it is passed, the Commission must resign as a body

Thank you. You've given me some hope that the EU can be reformed from the inside. I'll still be voting to leave, but at least I'll know where to direct my attention if we stay in.

The European Commission functions like a government. Do you vote for the government, or for MPs that then choose the government? It's the same.

It's not the same. The MPs that I vote for can propose legislation, the MEPs that I vote for cannot. Without the power to propose legislation, how do you expect MEPs to truly represent your interests in the EU?

The MEPs represent your interests by electing and controlling the European Commission who in turn propose laws. I reckon that if you believe that having the parliament proposing laws is that important, you should get in touch with your MEP

The MEPs don't elect the European Commission. The MEPs do not control the European Commission. You should really look into how the European Union functions, the MEPs have far less power than you seem to believe.