Comment from The Northern Echo - Less talk and more action

To make matters worse, these are all real jobs for real people with real skills making real things - not service sector, contract-less, part-time work for low-paid, untrained people answering telephones.

Any number of similar strands run through the job loss announcements: a global market in which the North-East is an industrial outpost, which saw off Corus; cheap competition from the Far East, which saw off the region's textile industry; the sunset on another sunrise industry, which saw off Fujitsu and Siemens; unstable exchange rates, which worried Nissan greatly.

And while there have been triumphs - Nissan stayed, Amec expanded on Tyneside - this is another body-blow to a town that cannot afford it. Just like Glaxo on Barnard Castle, Corus on Teesside, Plaxton in Scarborough, so Sanyo in Aycliffe. And we shouldn't forget the effects of foot-and-mouth on every tourist and agricultural interest in our countryside.

Just as foot-and-mouth skirted fortuitously around the constituency of Sedgefield, so major manufacturing job losses have recently left Tony Blair's heartland unaffected. Until now.

The North-East is not so nave as to think it can buck global trends, which is why yesterday's news was greeted with more dismay than outrage.

But we hope it is not nave in thinking its friends in Government are straining every sinew to do all they can to assist the region in its hour of need. That doesn't mean churning out statistics about how the minimum wage and the working families tax credit have disproportionately benefited the region more than any other.

It means real money and real investment and real on-the-ground involvement. It means reforming the Barnett formula, it means moving Government departments out of the over-heated South, it means giving the region its head to develop its own joined-up strategy to solve its own very real problems.

It doesn't mean expressions of ministerial sorrow or promises of things to come. It means real action.