MUCH has been written about Blackburn aspiring to being a city.

Is it really essential for the town? What is the point of becoming the most deprived city in the West?

Would it not be more appropriate to make the town a fit and proper place to live in, tackle the problem of the 20,000 unfit houses, bring back into use the hundreds of empty council properties and thousands more in the private sector, lying vacant.

This would be a more laudable aim than just providing more excuses for the councillors to go to junkets and expensive nosh-ups at council tax expense.

It has been suggested it will bring more work. Who needs that when we have a regeneration chairman who has come up with the next best thing to reinventing the wheel? His comments on the recent European grant was that £1 million each year over a seven-year period, would attract £70 million of private investment and create 3,000 jobs.

Who wants city status when we have a Labour Council that can create a utopia town with no unemployment problems ever again, for so little money? No doubt when Mr Straw tells Tony another lordship will be on its way to Blackburn.

WALT MEADOWS, Whalley New Road, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.