Godfrey Bloom

I have sat on the Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee now for nearly seven years. Every year they seem to distance themselves further from the real world. Very few members have commercial experience.

The latest piece of nonsense is the proposal to introduce quotas for female appointments. Forty percent it would appear being the bench mark. Quite why forty and not fifty, or indeed any other arbitrary number is beyond me.

Personally I believe any form of discrimination should remain outside the remit of politicians, who as a genre are far more prone to get things muddled than not.

After all selecting whom we marry, live with or go on holiday is a pretty discriminatory procedure. Even when we go to a restaurant and order food or wine we are being discriminatory. Indeed, when applied to fine art or music the term becomes complimentary. "He/she is very discriminating".

I have always been very discriminatory in whom I employ. It has given me over the years in the military, business and political world an enormous advantage. It has also left me with a very eclectic mix of professionals on my team. I would not dream of selecting them on the basis of colour, age, sexual orientation or gender. I cannot think of anything more offensive or patronizing. I have only one criterion which is the ability to do the job.

My last ultimate boss in the city was a female, a very well known one and with a reputation as being at the top of her international field. The boss of one of the UK's biggest energy companies is female. Incidentally so is her number two. Between them they have fifty years of experience in the energy industry.

Women though tend to prefer the professions and vocations, they predominate in the field of physiotherapy and radiography. They are now almost equally represented in financial services and the law with the ratio of women to men growing annually.

Similarly in the UK for the last two years women started more small businesses than men. They do not lack the entrepreneurial spirit.

To suggest they are too stupid, dull, lazy or incompetent to rise to the top without political assistance is disgraceful and immoral.

I wonder what Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher or Hilary Clinton would make of an argument that women could not make it on their own?

One also wonders how existing professional women would feel when the general public or even fellow professionals could not know if they were in office through experience and expertise or quota.

The UK Prime Minister and his predecessor both supported proactive discrimination in politics and less overtly in policing and the judiciary. Actually I can usually tell quota women because they are simply not up to the job.

Also, in order to discriminate in favour of a woman, the system has to discriminate against a man. Examples are already creeping into the European Commission and Parliament. True professional, ambitious and competent women must despair.

It would be dangerous also not to emphasize the appallingly anti-libertarian aspect of positive discrimination in the commercial or public world. For the state to insist by threat of coercion and punishment that a private citizen or citizens must discriminate either in favour of or against other citizens returns us to an unsavoury aspect of European politics which emerged in the 1930s. I, for one, do not want to go back there.