Outrage as EU set to quiz women on their sexual history

UK Independence Party MEP Derek Clark urged women to protest by claiming they are virgins or have 1,000 sexual partners if the proposal is approved.

The proposed new European Commission power to collect facts and figures on population and housing across the EU would go further than any national census, Mr Clark warned.

The information the Commission wants to be allowed to gather includes information on the "consensual unions" of all women in the EU.

The contentious question, set out in a draft of what would go to each household every ten years, demands "Date(s) of the beginning of the consensual union(s) of women having ever been in consensual union: (i) first consensual union and (ii) current consensual union."

Mr Clark commented: "The Commission claims it needs to know all sorts of things about us in order to set policy properly, but does it really need to have such personal and intrusive detail? How can it possibly need to know how many sexual partners a woman has had, and when they were?

"It appears that only straight men are immune from the questioning as by cross referencing the answers it will be easy to know if the woman in question is gay or straight."

He added: "If this question appears on the census form I would suggest that everybody either claims either to be a virgin or to have at least 1,000 consensual sexual partners."

But the European Commission said accurate statistics help to formulate policy. "The data has to be fully comparable at the European level, and is often requested at a level of regional detail, variable breakdown and in a quality that can only be guaranteed by European legislation on population and housing censuses."

The full-scale EU-wide census, which needs the go-ahead from EU governments, would gather up information on everything from personal and family details to education, occupation, hours worked, and marital status - including "Date(s) of legal marriage(s) of ever-married women: (i) first marriage and (ii) current marriage".

Mr Clark said he hoped to have the plan thrown out when it goes before a European Parliament committee this afternoon.

"They want to know your income, whether your work is on the black, what durable consumer goods you possess, own account agricultural production, allotments, back gardens and terraces - your tomato plants will be regulated.

"It's a very long list and it goes further than any National census - further than you may wish to go."

He said a simple piece of software would allow unscrupulous public or private bodies to check on every detail of life: "They (the European Commission) must be utterly divorced from reality if they think that people will tell them the truth about this.

"At the last census the religion Jedi Knight became the fourth largest notified religion in the UK."