Godfrey Bloom

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Godfrey Bloom (born November 22, 1949 in London) 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^{[citation needed]} and is a popular speaker^{[citation needed]} 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 Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality 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". At the same time, he was reported as commenting that: "I just don't think [women] clean behind the fridge enough" and continued on saying "I am here to represent Yorkshire women who always have dinner on the table when you get home".^[1]

After widespread criticism of his comments, he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that 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."

On 12 November 2007, he took part in an interview on Woman's Hour. On hearing the experiences of a woman who lost her job at a small company after becoming pregnant, he responded:

"...there would be a lot more young women employed if they could contract with an employer to say 'if I choose to have a family, I will review my position.'... What about that young women who had started that business, maybe with her life savings? I think she's perfectly entitled to say to that employee ... 'Do you want to have babies or do you want a career? That's a perfectly legitimate question to ask.'" Woman's Hour News - 10m:10s