I WOULD have thought that as a person with ambitions to get on to Bolton Council, P Brierley would have taken time to read the BEN before making himself look silly with daft comments.

Had he bothered to read the BEN he would have seen that the recent Littlewoods closures had absolutely nothing to do with the world recession but were in fact a result of internal re-organisation. As a result, both David Crausby MP and Ruth Kelly MP were quite within their rights to seek a meeting with management.

What Tories like P Brierley won't tell you is that in fact 400,000 more people are in jobs since the election. With a leader like William Hague, it is easy to see why they abandon any hope of restoring their credibility nationally and perhaps why they instead try and instigate smear campaigns locally. However, by doing this, P Brierley has shown that he does not care how irresponsible or incorrect his comments are so long as they get him in the BEN in the months leading up to May's local elections.

What P Brierley should in fact be doing is explaining how his party could do better with the economy when their boom and bust economic policies led to interest rates of 15pc and the loss of over a million manufacturing jobs.

Frank Crompton

Kennet Close, Westhoughton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.