NORTH West MEP Gary Titley's comments (Letters, September 7) were alarmist and vague. He says that "Lancashire continues to lose jobs in manufacturing at a worrying rate."

What exactly is a worrying rate? What exactly is the rate at which Lancashire is losing these jobs? Mr Titley does not say. I wonder, does he know?

Rather than give details, he chooses to switch to a national figure of 80,000 jobs lost -- a strange tactic.

So, 80,000 manufacturing jobs lost, but Mr Titley claims that some people ask: "Does this matter when more jobs are being created in services than are disappearing in manufacturing?"

I'd like to ask Mr Titley who are these people who seem so nonchalant at such massive job losses? Do they live in his imagination?

"The picture is not the same elsewhere in Europe..." is his next claim. Where in Europe, Mr Titley? True to form, you do not say.

You simply say that manufacturing employment has "risen by 0.4 per cent in the 11 EU countries that make up the euro currency zone." Is this 0.4 per cent in every country within the euro currency or an average across the 11, which could mean that manufacturing jobs have been lost in other countries within the euro currency as they have in Britain. Again, Mr Titley, your vagueness serves you well.

The vagueness continues: "Most North West industrialists I speak to blame the job losses on an over-valued pound." Really?

There are no figures to tell us what percentage really believe this and what percentage believes that they are more likely to be attributed to the mis-management of the UK economy by present and previous governments.

I believe that we will eventually have to join a single European currency and, ultimately, that we will become a minor state in a United States of Europe, dominated solely because those in power in our country will ensure that our economy becomes so weak, our job losses become so great and our belief in our own ability to survive and thrive as an independent nation is so undermined that we will go to Europe begging to be let in to the 'club.'

But why would people like Mr Titley wish to bring about a situation whereby the very people that he claims to represent are hoodwinked with vague and misleading comments into gleefully accepting something which at one point they were united and vehement in their opposition to?

D MOOR (Mr), Livesey Branch Road, Blackburn.