UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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I do think the spending is 'comparable', which is not at all the same thing as 'equal'.
The UK's planning documents are all publicly available and show that you (and !samc@feddit.uk) are partly right: spending on infrastructure is not equal in cash terms; but would we want it to be?
If (hypothetically) you get a bigger return on investment when you invest in region A than region B, it'd be absurd to invest 'equally' in both, especially because those returns can be (and obviously are!) spent anywhere in the UK.The upshot of this is that investing in A might well lead to greater wealth for people in region B.
Plus, investment - spending - is only half the picture. What if the citizens of region A make a tax contribution that is greater than the relative share of investment they receive? I'm personally fine with that because I believe in redistribution, but it complicates the fairness argument. And then there are other considerations: it was expensive to build Crosssrail partly because the land is very expensive and (relatedly) Londoners need higher wages to make ends meet, so it (and all infrastructure) just did require relatively higher spending.
As the documents also show, vague waving at a supposedly deprived 'the north' is just grievance mongering. For example, Scotland and the North West are second and third to London in terms of overall investment, while the South East (clearly part of the London commuter belt!) is only just ahead of the North East in the bottom half of the table.
There are real disparities in all kinds of things in the UK, but making these kinds of baseless zero-sum arguments will get us nowhere.