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  1. Politics
20 August 2013

Godfrey Bloom: the only men who like feminists are “chaps who get sand kicked in their face on the beach”

The continued saga of Godfrey Bloom, aged 63 and three quarters.

By Alex Hern

If you’ve been keeping up with the saga of UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, you’ll know he’s someone who is not particularly prone to well-thought-out political interventions. Whether he’s making a speech in the European Parliament “drugged up” and having had “a couple of beers”, or raising valid questions as to whether or not he is a misogynist (evidence to the contrary: photos of him on a horse and with a women’s rugby team), he seems to wing pretty much everything. Despite (or because of?) this, he’s still UKIP’s second-highest-profile politician, and nothing seems to stick.

Still, he is clearly stung by accusations that his attitude to gender relations belongs in the century before last. He’s written a comment piece for Politics.co.uk, in which he lays out, once and for all, his view on the matter. “Let’s face it”, he writes, “men and women are different”.

The piece is 2,000 words long, because he has many opinions on the matter, but the absolute best paragraph is when he gets introspective:

Let us explore for a moment the questions needed to establish the difference between males and females. I am just about as ‘alpha’ as a male can be: army, rugby, boxing, cricket, commerce etc. I am not a ‘new man’. I would not be caught dead at a birth of a baby and I’m happy to punch the first man who tries to steal my beer.

A close second, however, is his opinion of feminism:

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Modern feminism was spawned in the bra burning 1970s by rather shrill, bored, middle class women of a certain physical genre. They punched miles above their weight but represented few women…

So who do these women represent? They are supported usually by men who seem to have no link with the usual social and sporting male preserves, the slightly effete politically correct chaps who get sand kicked in their face on the beach. You’ve guessed it. The middle class ‘liberal’ political elite.

Poor Ian Dunt, the editor of Politics.co.uk, has had to spend the last two hours reassuring people that Bloom really did write the piece:

 

 

Godfrey Bloom: literally unbelievable.

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