David Maddox: Dealing with Britain's Nazis

You can understand why when Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP (pictured top right), came to make his acceptance speech the other seven victorious MEPs for the North West of England as one turned their backs and vacated the stage.

No doubt none of them wanted to be pictured sharing a platform with a man who represents some of the more odious elements in British politics and the act was an understandable sign of their disgust and rejection of all that he stood for.

But, think on this. For the past few weeks the news agenda has been full of how the politicians in main parties in British have being doing their best to prove how unfit they are to govern. As each day has passed by we have seen how they have been helping each other to help themselves at the trough of public munificence in the MPs expenses scandal.

At the same time there has been a concerted campaign by these so called "establishment" parties to dissuade voters from turning to the BNP.

And the BNP has throughout portrayed itself as the victim of an establishment plot, the "clean" party on the outside of the corruption but on the side of the people which the main parties want to keep out.

It is of course all spin to cover its racist core, but when the main the representatives of the main parties walked off the stage together like they did in Manchester, they simply reinforced the image which the BNP has used to successfully gain a foothold in British politics.

Like it or not Griffin and his followers are now part of the democratic process and have been elected to office by the rules that govern our democracy. For that we can thank Tony Blair and his bizarre decision against the will of many of his Labour colleagues to accept the Liberal Democrats demands of introducing proportional representation.

There was no need for Mr Blair to do this, it was born out of New Labour's arrogance in the heady days of the late 1990s that people would always love them and that PR could guarantee a centre left Lib/ Lab government for generations to come with the Conservatives and Nationalists forever kept out. The test bed, Scotland, has since proven this assumption wrong with the SNP's famous victory in 2007, although arguably PR has worked North of the border to a point.

But with the European elections the critics have been proven right. Opponents of PR always warned that it would open the door to extremists and not just "cuddly" fringe groups like the Greens or more reasonable Nationalists like the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Now we have BNP MEPs and we can only be thankful that Blair was prevented from introducing PR for Westminster.

So given this new political reality the main parties would do better, perhaps, to clean up their own act and take on the BNP through proper debate instead of taking an approach that bolsters their pretence that they are the "victims of British politics" kept on the outside by a dysfunctional elite.