muppet, there's no way you can count Norfolk as part of the London commuter belt. The odd person might come in from Swindon or Cambridge or Brighton, but not enough to include these in London's metropolitan population either.
The difference in the US is that you've got continuous built up area over great distances. You can't really do it based on percentage of commuters into the central business district or city. There might be relatively few people commuting from mid- Suffolk County to Manhattan, for instance, but a lot that work in Melville, which in turn is unquestionably metro NY.
We have a lot of debates here about comparing US metros and European metros on an apples-to-apples basis, but the truth is that you really can't because the development patterns are so different. You can compare cities in the US to Canada or Australia, but none of those can really be compared fairly to European cities.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." - Isaac Asimov
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