THE Evening Telegraph has launched a campaign to save Lancashire's only remaining regiment. Here, Brigadier Geoffrey Sheldon, Colonel of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment and its most senior officer, explains why he believes Defence secretary Geoff Hoon should not merge the regiment or abolish its name. . .

THE Queen's Lancashire Regiment is your regiment. It is Lancashire at war and in peacekeeping, bringing the Lancashire qualities of guts, endurance, cheerfulness and care for our fellow beings.

That's why it is uniquely successful on operations and why it is always among the best recruited.

We have changed before as the Army itself has adapted to changes in the world. But for more than 200 years we have kept our proud Lancashire identity at our heart.

Many thousands served with our forebear regiments, the East, South and Loyal North Lancashires, in the two world wars.

Indeed more than 17,000 Lancashire men gave their lives in these conflicts and we will never forget either in the county or its regiments, their example and sacrifice. It is the county identity that gives strength to our regimental system for the infantry - a system which is the envy of the world's armies.

But the changes now planned by the Ministry of Defence are unnecessary and a grave mistake because they will fatally undermine the bedrock upon which that system is based. That bedrock of the local and county identity which, through concentrated recruiting, produces fine regiments like ours.

Local identity is not a romantic, abstract concept. More than 97 per cent of all Queen's Lancashire soldiers are from Lancashire. When the chips are down in battle and our lads face danger, difficulty and fear this really matters. Sharing with other Lancashire men, hearing a warm Lancashire accent next to them, has brought them through when others fail.

The plans which the Ministry of Defence now seeks to impose, following a decision which is due to be taken in November, will destroy that vital local identity through massive over-dilution. Every infantry regiment in the North of England, the Midlands, parts of the West Country, all of Scotland and all of Wales is to be merged into much larger amalgamations.

The Queen's Lancashires, specifically, stand in danger of being forced into some kind of North West regiment - or even, some Northern regiment, including all of Yorkshire too.

The MOD's proposals will not save money. They are the wrong answer to a future when we no longer move whole infantry regiments around from garrison to garrison so much.

We can best meet this need by managing our people's careers more collectively, while keeping our successful county regiments.

What is so destructively perverse about the MOD's proposal is that it has been tried before, and relatively recently at that, and has demonstrably failed.

There are regiments today which have been amalgamated far beyond the point at which they had a common local identity. Their soldiers, drawn from across three, four, or in one case even five counties, have little in common and no sense of shared identity.

These are the regiments which today cannot recruit sufficiently from their home areas. Instead, they must increasingly rely on ever-greater numbers of foreign and Commonwealth troops, specifically Fijians. Yet these are the regiments which will not be affected by the Ministry's plans.

Lancashire has a military history second to none and we are your regiment. We are fully recruited and ready for whatever the future holds.

All of us in your Queen's Lancashire Regiment have been overwhelmed and heartened by the love and support already shown by East Lancashire.

Together we can defeat this Whitehall proposal and keep the Queen's Lancashires for Lancashire.

Please join the campaign for your regiment. Together we can win.