A SERIOUS issue, the way public money is invested in Wales, rapidly degenerates into childish tit for tat point scoring.

This is the sort of Yah! Boo! politics that results in the public regarding all politicians with a disdain that borders on contempt.

Swansea Council leader Chris Holley made a perfectly valid point about the perception, throughout the rest of Wales, that Cardiff gets more than its fair share of investment.

That feeling was reinforced in this region when the Tory-Lib Dem UK Government announced that the electrification of the Great Western main line from Paddington would halt at Cardiff, rather than Swansea as had been announced by the previous Labour Government.

But he was on shakier ground when he tried to use last week's National Transport Plan to claim that the Welsh Government was also unwilling to invest west of Bridgend.

He cannot ignore the fact that the plan includes improvements to the Gowerton-Loughor train line and the A48 road between Pont Abraham and Cross Hands.

It may be true that the transport consortium for South West Wales had proposed other projects that were not included in the plan, but all parts of Wales could make the same point about what was a modest list of local upgrades announced by Welsh Transport Minister Carl Sargeant.

Mr Sargeant simply could have pointed this out and won the argument.

But his spokesman went much further, and accused Mr Holley and Swansea Council of standing idly by and doing nothing to secure electrification to Swansea.

This must have come as a surprise to the city's two Labour MPs, who sat alongside Mr Holley (and the editor of this newspaper) in a meeting with the UK Transport Minister at Westminster and jointly made a strong case for going electric all the way to Swansea.

Did Mr Sargeant not know that his Labour Party colleagues in Westminster had shared a platform with Mr Holley on this campaign?

Or did he choose to ignore that inconvenient truth for the sake of a cheap party point?

Either way, yet again the public is left with the impression that politics really is far too important to be left to politicians.