IT was when Tony Blair was first stung by grumbles in Labour's traditional heartlands that they were being overlooked by a government obsessed with middle-class values that Downing Street put out the mantra that the North-South divide is a myth.

Yet, despite heaps of evidence to the contrary ratified by the government's own figures on deprivation -- poorer health, higher unemployment, lower incomes and so forth -- we have Blackburn's MP, Home Secretary Jack Straw, slavishly repeating the Blair blurb.

They have poverty in the South, too, he says. So they do. But as much or as widespread as we have up here? Of course not.

Either Mr Straw wears blinkers or rose-coloured spectacles when he comes to East Lancashire, or he has signed up with His Master's Voice.

Come off it, Jack -- for every well-heeled, Ribble Valley-type pocket of prosperity up North, there's a dozen or more down South. And you and Tony Blair know it.