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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

The biggest subsidy is the supply of people, although these days much of those come from outside of the UK rather than other regions in the UK. Other places (and people in those places) bear the cost of making and raising the new people, and London (and other metros) gain the productivity from those new people.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc2872/fig03/index.ht...

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Yeah, that is expected I speculate. Or maybe it isn't, depending of how one chooses to look at things. But it's not public subsidies, as it actually runs the highest surplus, both in absolute terms and per capita: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

UK taxes are gathered centrally to London and then redistributed to the so called regions. The bulk of British government infrastructure is based in and around there, as is the BBC and a big chunk of royal spending (as royals and their employees live in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle (just outside London) for much of the year).

None of that will counted as "public subsidy" but collectively that will run into the billions. All those politicians, civil servants and BBC employees based there are spending UK public money to eat, sleep and travel within the city.

If a place like Liverpool had all that instead of London, then it would be Merseyside mysteriously generating a high surplus.

The biggest subsidy is the presence of government/civil service and royal "machinery", which ensures a steady flow of public money into the area before we even look at the vast amounts spent on London's infrastructure.

Much of British transport infrastructure is also designed to feed people into London (although London is less bad for that than Paris which is the hub of nearly all the French rail network.) The Channel Tunnel certainly does. Even the motorway and rail networks of Wales do to some extent.

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