That claim that leasehold is only in England and Wales

Any time spent discussing leasehold in the UK will confront an observer with the curious claim that residential long leases aren't used outside England and Wales.

Of course this is a bare-faced lie. All the residential property in the entire Australian Capital Territory is leasehold. Any image search for "leasehold" or "#leasehold" used to return mainly properties in Malaysia and Indonesia. It obviously exists in Canada and Israel as well.

What does the "no leasehold outside Britain" lie pre-empt?

If you think about it, what's actually going on is that people are lying that leasehold doesn't existing outside the UK in order to prevent discussion of reforming leasehold. You can't say "why not reform leasehold to make it work the way it works in some other country?" if the response is always going to be "There are no such other countries."

So what they're really saying by "It doesn't exist outside the UK" is "I don't want to discuss how to get leasehold fixed *in* the UK."

But that just means they're not in the discussion any more.

This tactic, of dishonestly denying a logically necessary premise of an undesired conclusion, is something I've covered before in relation to the UK housing debate:

Those image search results

These were found in a matter of seconds:

Countries that apparently have leasehold

• England & Wales
• Canada
• Israel
• Australia (ACT)
• Thailand
• United States
• Indonesia
• Thailand
• Ireland