IT is, surely, a sign of the desperation of Lancashire's preachy advocates of speed-camera saturation that they have enlisted Irish comedian Jimmy Cricket in an attempt to sprinkle some positive propaganda on their overkill tactics.

But their choice is nonetheless apt. For who else but a crackpot comic would go along with the pretence that this zero-tolerance clobbering of motorists is about saving lives and reducing injuries, rather than raising millions of pounds in fines -- when the facts suggest that speed cameras do not improve road safety?

No, I'm not talking about the compelling evidence aired recently on TV which showed that the police forces with the most aggressive anti-speeding policies reduced the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads by much less than the ones with the least militant outlook towards speeders.

Rather, I am talking about the fact that those who would have Jimmy Cricket convert us to their love of speed cameras are ignoring the clear evidence that death on the roads has gone UP while they have been trying to brainwash us that the cameras save lives.

Just clock the figures -- theirs, not mine -- which show that in Blackburn with Darwen since the introduction of speed cameras eight years ago, the number of road fatalities has risen from four a year to seven at the latest count.

The same source, the annual progress report on the council's local transport policy, even shows that in the first full year of the camera purge on speeding, fatalities actually trebled.

And accidents involving serious injuries? After the cameras came, they went up for three years running before they came down --- and the latest count shows they are on the increase again despite there being even more cameras .

These are facts which, surely, throw serious doubt on the effectiveness of speed cameras and traffic calming. But, of course, the figures are open to manipulation -- as we see when the authors of Blackburn with Darwen's report have chosen the totals for 1994-98 to calculate average casualty figures (why?) and, comparing them with last year's, say that the road deaths rate is unchanged.

No, it's not -- it's up. Or as Jimmy Cricket would say: "There's more."

What many readers, I think, may also find hard to believe is a reader's complaint that a police vehicle operating a mobile speed camera was parked on the pavement on the A666 under the motorway bridge at Darwen last Saturday afternoon. Surely not -- our diligent bobbies would not be so hypocritical as to break the law in order to enforce it, would they?