Godfrey Bloom
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Godfrey Bloom is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber for the United Kingdom Independence Party. He was first elected in 2004.
Godfrey Bloom has been Head of Research for a West End investment practice for over ten years.
Based in York he has won national recognition for fund management and is a popular speaker on financial economics at European universities and business seminars. He spent over twenty years with a Yorkshire Territorial Army regiment and is President and Vice President respectively of his local cricket and rugby club.
In July of 2004, Godfrey Bloom's comments to the media provoked controversy. Shortly after being appointed to the European Parliament's women's rights committee on 20 July, Godfrey Bloom gave an interview in which he said: "No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age. That isn't politically correct, is it, but it's a fact of life. The more women's rights you have, it's actually a bar to their employment". After widespread criticism on his comments on Tuesday he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday his comments were "said for fun" to illustrate a more serious point, claiming that legislators did not understand the consequences of their actions. "They probably in quite good faith put in a piece of legislation which is designed to protect women in the workplace but what actually happens is it... writes them out of employment."