Meet The 12 Most Embarrassing Members Of The European Parliament

Welsh UKIP MEP Gill wants to curb immigration to the British Isles. But this did not stop him from hiring dozens of immigrants, mainly from Poland and the Philippines, for his company in the North West of England, which employed workers on low wages.

It went out of business after falling into a £116,000 financial hole, years before Gill got elected.

Alessandra Mussolini is the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, the founder and leader of Italian fascist party.

She was elected to Strasbourg in June running with Silvio Berlusconi's party Forza Italia, after the party she used to lead, Azione Sociale, failed to enter in Parliament in the Italian elections of 2008.

In 2006, she told a transsexual MP: "Better to be a fascist than a f**got!"

Prior to entering politics, she tried a career as an actress and singer, and in 1982 she even sold a record in Japan.

She also appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine in 1983.

Gollnisch, who was found guilty of being a holocaust denier in 2007, long fought Marine Le Pen for the leadership of the Front National, the far-right French party.

He had his parliamentary immunity stripped in 2011 for inciting racial hatred and also dropped his trousers during a speech to protest against immigration.

Groups of students took to the street in protest in 2011 when the teacher of Japanese was reappointed as a professor at Lyon III university.

He has been an MEP since 1989.

Sonneborn worked for years as the editor of a satirical magazine before entering politics.

In 2011, he wore blackface for an electoral poster featuring the slogan: "Ich bin ein Obama" as a reference to John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.

One of the goals of the party he founded, Die PARTEI, is to rebuild the Berlin Wall.

He was elected in June 2014 after a campaign that used slogans such as, "Hands off German willies!"

Flanagan is an independent Irish MEP, who campaigned against the European Union to get elected in June 2014. He styles his hair and beard like the comic-strip character Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon. This earned him the nickname Luke 'Ming' Flanagan.

A well known pro-cannabis advocate, in 2001 he sent a marijuana cigarette to every member of the Irish parliament to promote legalisation. He has several drug convictions.

Ciocca is one of the rising stars in the Italian anti-immigrant party Northern League.

Only 35, Ciocca was nicknamed "the Brad Pitt of politics" during his first stint on the regional council of Lombardy.

Previously he worked in his hometown as assistant to the mayor Piero Zetti, who made a name for himself by putting up iron gates to protect the village "against criminals."

To get elected to Strasbourg, he hired five immigrants to star in his electoral ads. The workers — from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Angola, and North Africa — talked to their fellow countrymen, asking them not to come to Italy, given the state of the economy.

Borghezio is a veteran of the European Parliament, having first joined it in 1999.

In 2005, he lit on fire some wooden pallets that some homeless people were using as part of a shelter under a bridge.

In 2011, Borghezio was expelled from his parliamentary group after saying that Italy's minister for integration, Cécile Kyenge, would have being more suited to working as "a housekeeper." He kept his seat as independent.

Borghezio is also known for having disinfected train seats where migrants were sitting, and for having tried to break into a meeting of the Bilderberg group in 2011.

In 2007 Szegedi was one of the founders of the Hungarian Guard, a pro-Nazi political party that was outlawed two years later. He then joined Jobbik and ran for the European Parliament on an openly anti-Semitic platform.

In 2012 he discovered that he himself was Jewish.

Ousted from his party, he kept his seat as an independent MEP while taking on the most radical of transformations: he is now an ultra-Orthodox Jew who observes Sabbath and goes to synagogue.

Voigt, elected in June with the National Democratic Party of Germany, tried to nominate Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, for the Nobel peace prize in 2007. Voigt has also said that "at most 340,000 could have died in Auschwitz."

In 2010 he sued a hotel for refusing to let him in, after the hotel stated that they "could not guarantee the well-being of our guests" had he stayed there. He lost that case.

In 2009 a district court in Berlin sentenced him to 7 months in prison, later suspended, for handing out racist pamphlets during the 2006 World Cup.

He sits on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in the European Parliament.

Bloom once held the worst voting record among all MEPs, showing up for only 1,609 votes out of 6,961 between 2009 and 2014.

Elected with UKIP in 2004, he resigned from the party's parliamentary group in 2013, after he joked that UKIP's female activists were "sluts". On that occasion he kept his seat as an independent.

He quit UKIP in October this year, saying that Nigel Farage's party was "drifting towards the politically correct mainstream like everybody else."

The younger brother of former Italian defence minister Ignazio, La Russa served in the European Parliament between 2004 and 2009. The son of a fascist MP during WWII, he has said that he still admires fascism.

Shortly after leaving Strasbourg, he said in an interview that "there are the depraved and there are the homosexuals, and these homosexuals need to be cured, because it is possible to heal from this illness."

Despite his views are on democracy and LGBT issues, he also served on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in Strasbourg.

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