Too many rules and too much red tape are strangling Britain's 3.8 million small businesses, the UK Independence Party claimed yesterday.

UKIP Euro MP Godfrey Bloom said the only answer is for the UK to leave the European Union, source of about 80% of the employment regulations governing companies across 25 countries.

Mr Bloom, himself a small businessman, made his name in politics last July within days of becoming an MEP. In an attack on maternity leave rules, he said no self-respecting small businessman with a brain would ever employ a woman of child-bearing age.

And he said he had decided to join the European Parliament's women's committee because "I just don't think they clean behind the fridge enough".

Mr Bloom is now warning small businesses cannot survive in a culture of over-regulation.

Speaking at the launch of UKIP's policy to save Britain's small businesses he said: "We have a situation where there is so much regulation, not just on maternity, that small businessmen are saying 'What is the point? Why should I bother to recruit anybody, male or female? I will stay small and not bother."'

He went on: "I think this situation is unfair and wrong.

"The more regulations that come out of this place (the EU), the more detrimental it is to people being employed and, as I said before, young women are being discriminated against because of over-regulation in the workplace."