EVERYONE in East Lancashire is waiting agog (or otherwise) for this week's hot news from my old friend the Local Government Boundary Committee.

I guess it's "otherwise" in the case of 99% of the population! Anyway we're about to get their latest wheezes for ripping apart our local councils and setting up something else.

As part of Mr Blair's penalty for having a new regional assembly, the county council and the district councils will go.

Instead we will get the chance to choose from two different "unitary" councils to take over everything the county and districts now do, apart from those things which they will remove up to regional level. Wow!

The only thing for sure is that after only 25 years in their present form Burnley, Pendle, Rossendale and the Ribble Valley would all disappear, along with Hyndburn and other Lancashire districts.

Here in East Lancs the committee might offer us a "Burpendale" mini-monster of Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale with Ribble Valley ludicrously hived off to Blackburn.

Or they might suggest a bigger and even more scary monster in which we all come under a Greater Blackburn!

The daftest idea last time round was to scrap all our local councils and hand everything over to a super-frankenstein unitary Lancashire County Council. That might have one plus if it gets the whole thing laughed out of court.

Of course, we only have to suffer the cost and chaos of any of these changes if we vote for Mr Prescott's plan for a North West regional assembly in the referendum later this year.

The problem here is that the "we" in this vote is not the people of Burnley, or Pendle, or even of Lancashire. It's over 5 million voters in the whole of the North West.

So we could give a thumping "no" vote here and still get lumbered by the rest of the North West - 80% of the voters, from Carlisle to Crewe and taking in all Greater Manchester and Merseyside - voting "yes".

A few days ago a 12-page full-colour pamphlet plopped through doors in Winewall from the pompously named "Office of the Deputy Prime Minister". Apart from lots of pictures of people looking a bit gormless, giving thumbs ups and thumbs downs, the content is all government propaganda to get us to vote "yes".

If I have to use parliamentary language I would say some of the content is misleading. Even "terminologically inexact"!

But if you read the detail you will see that the new regional assembly would actually not do very much at all - and much of that would be stolen from local councils.

If you want my view they're trying to pull the wool over our eyes. And they are trying to rig the debate. But what's new?