THESE are dark days indeed. The north west awoke on Monday to discover it had elected Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right BNP, to one of its eight seats in the European Parliament.

A man whose party only accepts white members. A man whose last general election manifesto expressed a desire to push Asian and Black Britons out of their homeland.

A man with a criminal conviction for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred.

These are unpalatable truths. It is understandable then, that the decent majority are this morning looking for someone to blame.

Is it Gordon Brown's fault? Is it the fault of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs? No.

Their voters may have stayed at home in large numbers, but politics is not like football. You don't have to always support the same team.

Angry

A lifelong Labour voter angry at what's been happening in Westminster would have been infinitely better served switching to a different, credible, party. That would have sent a message. As Edmund Burke famously said, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." Abstaining is doing just that: nothing. It served no purpose but to open the back door to Griffin and his ilk.

Was it the system of proportional representation? No. The rules were the same for everyone. They have been used before with no complaints - and no BNP Euro-MPs. There is an appetite in our country for more proportional voting, not less - and rightly so.

The BNP still needed to get nearly 10 per cent of the vote to get a seat. The problem wasn't the threshold. The problem was that they had enough support to reach it, and not enough people trying to stop them.

Was it other parts of the north west `super-constituency' - in Burnley, for example, or Merseyside - that boosted the BNP vote? Again, no. The struggle for the eighth and final seat in our region came down to a straight fight between the BNP and the Green party.

In seven out of 10 boroughs in Greater Manchester - Wigan, Tameside, Salford, Rochdale, Oldham, Bury and Bolton - we preferred to vote for a party that stands for racial division rather than a party that wants to build more windfarms. Either that, or we just didn't bother to choose.

So was it finally, the fault of the MEN - giving the oxygen of publicity to Griffin by exposing him and his odious party? No. All we did was to put information, culled chiefly from the BNP's own manifestos, into the public domain. Not oxygen, then, but the poisonous cloud that the party has carried round with it since it was born of the neo-Nazi National Front.

Unpalatable

The unpalatable truth is that there is, among our number, a small but significant percentage who share Griffin's vile views. Of the rest of us, a huge number cared so little about this threat that we were not even prepared to vote for someone else.

The problem with democracy is that it is utterly transparent. All the facts and figures are there. Every valid vote is counted and written down in black and white.

What history will show, then, is that 9.12 per cent of votes in Greater Manchester - and 8.0 per cent across the north west - were cast for the BNP. Even though the overall turnout of 31.9 per cent meant only 2.5 per cent of adults voted for the party, it was enough to win a seat - and with it around £1m of taxpayers' money, and an international platform to air their views.

In a democracy, you always get the politicians you deserve. You and I have no one to blame but ourselves. The north west of England will now be known across Europe as a place where the BNP took root. The decent majority have allowed an indecent thing to happen.

We can only hope that this will serve as a wake-up call. That people will realise exactly why our vote is so precious; why people fought and died to secure it. We can only hope that Griffin, given such a platform, will expose himself and his party for what they really are. There is no guarantee that will happen. We had our chance to act; we did not. Now we can only watch and wait. That is the price of apathy.