[BillGreene]

Fairtrade is not about keeping specific jobs in a specific location it is about stopping multi-national companies using their enormous power to make people work, for what is basically slave wages.

Jobs will always go to where employers will get the best return on their investment. To keep jobs in this area, or even to bring new ones in, we need to show that the 'value added' is worth the investment.

This does not mean that we work cheaper, it means that we must work smarter.

Yes, it is true that manufacturing jobs have gone and probably more will go in the future. The reason is that we cannot change the fact that labour costs in this country are greater than in places like China. There is a view that it is only by jobs moving around the world that all the people in the workld will get a chagne at a better life.

A lot of these jobs will end up in China, but China does not, yet, have the designers, original thinkers, etc that GB has. One of the reasons that they bought Rover was to get the intellectual wealth of the company.

I work in IT and programming jobs are disappearing to India, Egypt and in time they will go to China. It is impossible to stop this.
But IT is not just about programming, it is also the thought processes that think of ways that we can use IT and then implement it (using Indian workers to produce the programming code).

If this area and East Lancashire in general is to have a real future, we have got to invest now in our young people (i.e. educate them better) so that they are able to think 'outside of the box' and have the big ideas that will be the wealth for their's and our children.