I HAVE read some whacky things in my time but the latest report of the Electoral Reform Society - in this case on the BNP and Burnley - takes some beating.

Like people who sometimes write to me, using green ink and loads of underlining, it starts off sane enough. They describe in factual terms what has happened in Burnley, and suggest that eight of nine voters gave "immigration and asylum" as their reason for voting for the BNP. Interestingly, it adds that almost 70 per cent of the non-BNP voters described race relations in Burnley as good or very good.

But then we are told that if only the magic of proportional representation had been the basis of Burnley's voting system, the scourge of the BNP would have been no more.

In truth, I've parodied them. But not much. For they said (page 4) that if the single transferable vote - a form of proportional representation - "had been used in past elections to Burnley Council, it is more likely that the Council have been responsive to local problems, that the tensions which have afflicted Burnley would have been better managed by the Council and that the sense of dissatisfaction in the Council which allowed the BNP to grow would not have been as acute". (This tripe, and the rest of the report, is available on www.electoral-reform.org.uk in case you think I've made it up.)

I am not in favour of the BNP. I regard their "programme" as a dreadful cul-de-sac, which plays on people's fears, but offers no serious solutions. But where they have won seats in Burnley - or as they did in a by-election in Blackburn - they won because they got more votes than any of the other candidates. To suggest after they have won that the rules of the game should be changed is both undemocratic and an insult to voters.

I am not opposed to the use of proportional representation in all circumstances. I have supported its use in Northern Ireland, voted for systems of PR for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and piloted a bill through the Commons to provide PR for the European Parliamentary elections. (I also think there are plenty of arguments in favour of the Alternative Vote.)

But here are a couple of cautionary tales:

First, France in the 1980s. Worried by the rise of the far right - and deeper worries that he might lose some up-coming elections - the then French President, Francois Mitterand, decided to move to a PR system, only later to learn that he had unleashed a tiger and breathed oxygen into the very party - the French National Front - which he had been trying to asphyxiate.

Second, and at the risk of sounding indelicate, but it's as well to draw these unsavoury faults to the attention of the Electoral Reform Society, there's the small matter of Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich. He first gained national electoral office in the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s under a perfectly proportional system of PR.

Gloriously, in their "recommendation" immediately preceding their proposal for PR for local elections in towns like Burnley and by implication Blackburn and everywhere else - the Electoral Reform Society say "these issues need to be tackled politically and democratically rather than by an attempt to manipulate the voting system". Exactly.

But they ought to take their own advice. And the simple truth is that wherever the BNP are, they will only be defeated by democratic, political work by the mainstream political parties.