SO Blackburn with Darwen wants to grab part of our green belt to meet the "Aspirations of the Pennine Lancashire transformational agenda in providing strategic sites for high value employment" (LT, November 14).

This at a time when our country is managing to find many thousands of jobs for immigrants.

I am not sure who precisely will benefit from the aspirations of the Pennine Lancashire transformational group, but have we not been here before with disastrous consequences?

Karl Marx sat writing in Cheetham's library while his friend Friedrich Engels took in the sites of Salford as he visited his father's mills. The slums that were the result of the transformational aspirations of those early pioneers of job creation not only helped to inspire communism but are an eyesore yet.

Those of us with our roots in Manchester, the world's first industrial city, are not aware of too many advantages of the high value employment that accrued to our forebears.

Enormous wealth was created for the rich and often heartless few at the expense of the many.

Rishton can claim to be the final frontier of the industrial coffin that stretches from down from the black country and was created by the unbridled greed of many of the early grabbers of strategic sites. Our green and pleasant land starts here.

I trust and pray that our council of Hyndburn will take a stand so that Lancashire, seared and bleared by trade, as the poet Manley Hopkins put it, may keep its Northern parts, starting from Rishton clean, green and fit for people to enjoy for the future.

KEVIN DEAN, Station Road, Rishton.