[garinda]

We actually spoke about some of these issues tonight in the car, on the way home from seeing 'And Did Those Feet', a play set in Bolton in 1923, just after the Great War, and before the General Strike.

There were 600 mills, or associated textile firms in Bolton, equally as numerous as this area

An area where there was jobs for all, in the past.

Fed up with one, you'd start at the next on Monday.

Full employment doesn't hide the fact that the majority of people were too poor to send for a doctor, and many people died, because they couldn't afford medicine.

You may have had a job, but that meant you were paying rent to live in relative poverty. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, no money to put coal on the fire, if you also wanted to put bread on the table.

A job, but no paid leave, or holidays, even unpaid time off.

A job, but with no rights or benefits if you were too old or sick to work, or the bosses just didn't need you. You were given your marching orders, and the next lot started on your old shift.

We might have lived in an area where there were a thousand dark, Satanic mills, and jobs a plenty, but lets not get misty eyed about the past.

There were jobs for all, but the lives of the vast majority of people who had those jobs, was hellish. I know because like so many, my family were those workers.

Somethings change for the better, some things for the worse, but change can never be halted.

Some change is definitely for the better, because having 'Shaking Palsy', as it was then known, eighty years ago I'd have been up in Queen's Park Workhouse.

Time will tell if any one politican will have an impact on the job market in Hyndburn.