EVEN in the relatively-buoyant employment climate that East Lancashire has, with fewer than three per cent out of work, it is still sad to see jobs being axed.

But it is more so when they are being lost at a firm that for more than 60 years has been a mainstay of our region's work scene.

For the loss of 70 more jobs at TV components makers LG Philips Display's plant in Blackburn - just eight months after 150 were cut - grimly characterises the decline of mass employment in manufacturing over the past 40 years.

Though Philips is still a mighty name in the world of electronics, it is no longer the byword for an abundance of jobs that it once was in our region, when thousands were created at its giant works in Blackburn and at its huge Simonstone TV cathode tubes plant which opened in the 1950s.

Now it is following the syndrome that industry in East Lancashire has long experienced at the hands of changing manufacturing methods, ruthless market forces and globalisation which have seen so many jobs lost or disappearing overseas - and once-familiar names like Michelin, Rists, Platt, Belling, Birtwistle and more vanish from our workplaces.

In compensation, thousands of new jobs have been created by new businesses in the service and commercial sector. But it is sad to see manufacturing shrinking and sad when one of its biggest employers in East Lancashire is reduced to a shadow of its former self.