Expect nothing from Labour until next general election

I SYMPATHISE (up to a point) with Cornwall's Liberal Democrat MPs and the Chamber of Commerce's chief executive (your article 'Chancellor under fire for ignoring Cornwall issues, West Briton, June 19), but I don’t know what else they can have been expecting from the Government's Spending Review.

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Decades of experience illustrate the paradox which underlies Cornwall’s representation in Parliament: that governments only start caring about what happens down here when there’s an election on the cards. We saw this with the previous regime; Cornwall returned six Conservative MPs and a Conservative-led council which with the Conservatives also in Number 10 would, so we were assured, unlock a deluge of government funding for the county. In reality, Cornwall got nothing - less than nothing, in fact, since it saw its share of the national pot reduced even further than had already been the case throughout the previous decade of Tory rule, this time without the assistance of the EU, and what little money was on offer was made conditional on agreeing to have a Mayor for Cornwall, a costly extra layer of bureaucracy which, like the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, would have existed only to pro