One of Ukip's top women candidates has defended the stream of politically incorrect comments from fellow party members, saying she encountered far worse in the Conservative party.
Janice Atkinson, who plans to stand in next year’s European elections, defected from the Tories to Ukip in 2010.
“If you think about the political parties and the type of people that belong to them, I came across more sexism in the Tory party than I ever have done in Ukip,” she told The Times.
Janice Atkinson, who plans to stand in next year’s European elections for Ukip
She pinpointed attitudes in the decade-old Conservative and Liberal social clubs in rural Britain. “They have still got those outdated attitudes.
"They’d like to go back to a 1950s Britain. We’re not going back to a 1950s Britain, we’ve got to look forward.”
She defended MEP Godfrey Bloom's suggestion that women of child-bearing age should not be hired by small businesses. “The point he was making is that this is all very damaging. If you take the baker’s down the road, if they employ five or six women and three or four of them go off on maternity leave, that’s a big problem," she told the paper.
Bloom does not "have a racist bone in his body", Atkinson said. He was accused of racism after he referred to countries that received aid from Britain as "bongo bongo land".
In a follow-up op-ed for Politics.co.uk, he said women are better in the kitchen and men who support feminism are "effete".
"Most women can find the mustard in the pantry quicker than a man and most men can reverse a car better than a woman," Godfrey Bloom said on Tuesday.
He added: "Men and women care about different things on a micro-scale. Leaving the lavatory seat up, wet towels on the bed and the top left off the toothpaste will drive a wife mad.
"A man simply cannot understand what the problem is. Most wives do not regard putting petrol in the car as any part of their responsibility. Men cannot see the point in making the bed if you are going to get back in it tonight."
Bloom did admit there were some exceptions to this rule, but said those women who could park a car well was "not the norm".
Bloom also attacked modern feminism as being spawned by "rather shrill, bored, middle class women of a certain physical genre".
Atkinson said she resented female quotas in board rooms and the "interference" of politicians like "Guardian feminista" Labour's Harriet Harman.
“There’s this whole endemic sort of feminista thing and because they can’t get there by their own means they want quotas and they want to impose that on the rest of us," Atkinson said.