On London Extra: Buying London

Don't blame foreigners for high house prices. Plus Labour's seat selections, the shrinking Standard and how diversity came to Cardross Street

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A sense of public duty compelled me to endure a few minutes of Buying London, a reality TV show about estate agents flogging super-expensive London property to super-wealthy people.

Basking in its own superficiality is part of the programme's sell to viewers, so I won't oblige it with high-minded rebukes for its low-level aims. Better to regard it as just the latest cultural addition to the "rich London" cliché pool and, by extension, a fresh reinforcement of the populist belief that the "super-prime" market is to blame for London housing prices being so high.

The idea that foreigners with footloose fortunes are the definitive big reason for this giant problem caught on in a big way in 2013 after a New York Times article offering that neat diagnosis was seized upon by anti-globalist Left and Right alike. The latter also used it to reinforce its line against immigration. The former are still insisting (see Guardian) that the very top end of the market explains why even the bottom end is out of reach for everyone else.

Leaving to one side the oddity of progressives claiming a colonising force of greedy foreigners purchasing Belgravia terraces has stopped them getting a mortgage in Penge, we need to look a bit beyond a tiny, if lurid, niche feature of the picture to find truer sources of this aspect of London's housing sickness, exploring instead a complex mix of more banal factors such the value of land and the price of bricks.