Godfrey Bloom found himself in another Twitter storm last week after the charity Maternity Action tweeted a picture of his email response to a campaign it ran in 2010.
The now-independent MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire has been in the spotlight recently over various public remarks about women.
He told a room of Ukip activists at a ‘women in politics’ fringe meeting that the room was “full of sluts” because several activists declared that they did not clean behind their fridges. When asked about the incident and why Ukip literature had only white faces on the cover, Bloom went on to whack Channel 4 News’s Michael Crick over the head with a conference guide while simultaneously branding him a “racist”.
Ukip leader Nigel Farage immediately withdrew the whip from him and soon afterwards Bloom announced he would resign as Ukip MEP.
Maternity Action (@MaternityAction) then decided to wish Bloom farewell by tweeting a screenshot of his response to its campaign material produced in 2010.
At the time, in a bid to fire up support for proposed changes to the European Pregnant Workers Directive, Maternity Action had contacted several MEPs about what it considered “fantastic improvements”. The Directive included improvements to maternity pay and improvements to prevent discrimination against pregnant women.
Since 2009 Bloom had served on the EU’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality and so seemed like a natural choice to promote the campaign to, even though in 2004 he told an interviewer that “no self-respecting businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of childbearing age”.
So staff at Maternity Action were left shocked when he blasted them for producing “dreadful nonsense” and suggested that the charity “stick to giving advice on nappies and breastfeeding or whatever it is that brought your organisation into existence”.
A spokeswoman from Maternity Action told civilsociety.co.uk today that the charity contacted all MEPs about the issue before the Parliamentary vote. Although not all responded pledging support, she said, “Bloom’s response was random and bizarre”.
Bloom will continue to serve as an independent MEP although he will remain a paying member of Ukip and will resume his role on the EU’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality.
