WE live in one of the world's most prosperous countries.
And that remains a fact however gloomy the national economic situation today might be said to be compared with three years.
But depressingly within Britain there are some areas a lot worse off than others in terms of those things that affect quality of life like housing, education and health.
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However convenient it might be to find scapegoats the differences aren't the result of some recent happening, like an influx of immigrants, despite what some of the loonies of the far right would have us believe.
The truth is there has been no spectacular decline in fortunes.
East Lancashire is an area where there have always been significant pockets of serious deprivation.
For proof of that you don't have to go back to the 19th century either.
Just look at the comments of best-selling author Jo Cox on her recent visit back "home" after years of living in the sheltered, wealthy environment of Bedfordshire.
Little more than 50 years ago she remembered a childhood in which brothers and sisters slept six-to-a-bed and a treat was being taken to a bench outside Nazareth House where nuns would feed her bread and dripping alongside tramps.
"Some Sundays when mam was determined to have a proper sit-down family meal all the children were sent to the local market as it was closing down for the night to pick all the waste vegetables from the floor. Mam washed them, cut off the bruises and cooked them in a large pot and that was our meal," she said.
This doesn't happen any more but it is disappointing to see that national yardsticks for poverty still put us very low in national league tables and getting worse rather than better.
Part of the problem is that national politicians have only one real thing on their minds and that is popularity with the maximum number of people in the short term.
And areas like East Lancashire sadly just don't carry enough clout to influence them compared with some of the big cities where far more parliamentary seats could be won or lost with the right cash handouts.
What other explanation is there for example for the Department of Transport's decision not to give the paltry (in terms of their annual spend) sum of £8million to bring East Lancashire's rail link with Manchester up to a standard which will allow people to commute to work in the city?
When you look at the commuter systems in other cities, and even Manchester's own metro, the pathetic two carriage rattle-traps that we have to put up with - running for several miles on a single track - are a very unfunny joke.
It's time for us to wake up and start to pile on real united pressure so that politicians and bureaucrats begin to believe that they dare not ignore the needs of East Lancashire.
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