It fits their general pattern of "anything mildly complicated that involves a government doing stuff to help the average person is a conspiracy to hurt you".
Regulations for easier trade of bananas?
Regulations to encourage recycling?
Human Rights?
Health and Safety?
Climate change plans?
New school cirriculum?
You should hate and fear all these things according to them. Because if people saw government as a way to improve everyone's lives, they'd probably use it to stop powerful people doing stuff, like poisoning people, starting wars or destroying the planet for money.
So scientists saying the best way to deal with an infectious disease is to pay people to stay home, because we're all part of a society that needs to work together to reach the best outcome for all of us, is scary to them, so they attack it like they always do.
Anything that involves international co-operation and co-ordination is anathema to those with a nationalist or isolationist leaning, because it means you have to work with foreigners to address it. Either it doesn't exist, or it's a foreigner conspiracy anyway, or somehow both at the same time.
Get back to normal, back to work peasants. Crowd onto trains and herd yourselves back into the super-expensive office blocks clustered in super-expensive cities.
Property underwrites a huge portion of investments and pensions. If we suddenly discovered that 80% of us could work from home, anywhere on the planet, why would anyone pay £1.5m for a house that would cost £400k if it were just an hour away?
> My hunch is that their owners are losing money on property investments and are desperate to get employees back in the office, who knows.
This conspiracy theory based on hunch falls with Occams Razor, as both owners and writers at newspapers likely diversify their investments like any other investor.
You must not be familiar with the intricacies of UK property ownership. Most desirable properties in London are owned by a small group of aristocratic people who really do just hold property, and things which give them political influence like newspapers. Corporate ownership of buildings is not as prevalent as, say, in New York (except in the family business sort of way).
Part of this is tradition, but also the quirks of UK property law which makes it very hard to trance ownership of property, and so these people who value their privacy prefer property over other more liquid investments they’d have to disclose.
