ALMOST 1,000 people, many virtually on the Prime Minister's doorstep, are thrown on to the scrap heap and Mr Blair appears almost to shrug it off. He also delivers a little lecture: "Tough luck. Great shame. But that's just how things are today."

I paraphrase, but only marginally. To quote Mr Blair exactly, he said the near-shutdown of Black & Decker's Spennymoor plant was "a tragedy for the workforce - but it's the world we live in... It is the nature of modern business... It is the economy of the future.''

True, he also spoke of work-finding efforts, but in words that probably rubbed salt in the wounds of those losing their jobs. "We will make sure they are properly looked after.'' Good grief. Mostly these are people in the prime of life, willing and able to do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay. Not frail, sick and old, in need of care.

But let us look more closely at the "nature of modern business''. Simultaneous with the Black & Decker cutbacks came the brutal dismissal of workers at Wolsingham's steelworks, abruptly told not to turn up the following morning. The minimum wage nothwithstanding, it is easy under New Labour to imagine that 20th Century progress in the workplace never happened and we are back in the darkest days of the Victorian mine and factory owners.

While people who have served a company loyally and well for years can be discarded overnight, others, vaulted in at the top, can stay but briefly yet leave with a fortune. The latest example looks like being Robin Southwell, chief executive of engineering consultants WS Atkins. Ousted after just 18 months with the company, where he has presided over a 50 per cent fall in profits and 100 per cent rise in debt, he is expected to receive £360,000.

His counterpart with Aquila, the company that owns Midlands Electricity, has just quit with a £4.9m pay-off after just nine months in the job, though he has been with the company longer. His severance package includes medical cover and "office and administrative support'' for 18 months. If that's the level of "care'' Tony Blair has in mind for the axed workers of Black & Decker and Weardale Steel, no one will complain.

Meanwhile, the "nature of modern business'' is also kind to ex-PMs. Less well known than John Major's hitherto hidden sex life is that he receives £111,000-a-year as a non-executive director of the Mayflower Corporation, a truck and coach building enterprise which embraces Plaxton's at Scarborough. Now on the dole through downsizing which has cost a fifth of Mayflower employees their jobs, not a few of Plaxton's former staff will have given a little more of their lives to the company than John Major.

Of course it's true that global forces now rule business. But, in Opposition, Tony Blair fostered the impression that the strongest guarantee of job security would be a Labour government. Now, though holding the reins, it insists control is out of its hands.

This deception is old and stale. But to North-East workers it has a special sting, because there's a Cabinet Minister down almost every street.