EVEN a hard-hearted sort like me, who believes that bending the immutable laws of economics with grants or subsidies to create jobs is ultimately a waste of time, raises his eyebrows at the preferential deal which -- in a week when more than 1,600 jobs bled from East Lancashire -- paid an old-established firm £2.4million to up sticks from Blackburn to go to a new factory in County Durham and leave 113 jobs behind.

For what do we find is the rationale behind the grant of this size that has persuaded East Lancashire medicines company SSL, still better known as Cupal, to move to the North East?

This generous dollop of government aid, we are told, greases the company's move to Peterlee because Durham was granted special Enterprise Zone status -- and bumper come-hither grants -- by the government to offset the area's employment problems caused by the closure of its coalfields.

Oh, really? Then, pray, what status does repeatedly-ravaged East Lancashire qualify for, when it has lost not only a coalfield, but a giant textiles industry, the huge engineering companies that went with it and its footwear industry as well?

Amazingly, it gets less help and fewer grants for firms and only recently received another blow, thanks to the government cocking up the new regional aid map earlier this year to such an extent that it had to be re-drawn -- so badly that dirt-poor areas of East Lancs were left off while well-heeled ones got on it.

But if the upshot, when the jobs haemorrhage in our area ends up being accelerated by it, is ministerial bluster and hand-wringing, can a cynic like me be pardoned for observing that the job-creation money being poured into the North East's former coalfield areas is not just because the pits have shut, but because ministers with parliamentary seats in those parts -- such as Premier Tony Blair as well as Peter Mandelson and Alan Milburn -- are eager to purchase a little job security themselves from the voters there?

I only ask -- as might the poor blighters here pitched on to the dole.