The very air across Britain can seem polluted these days with political discourse of the vilest sort, and the stench only gets worse whenever we’re in the vicinity of the ballot box. Yet a recent YouGuv survey has suggested that the bad smell isn’t only metaphorical, because UKIP supporters – presumably in their endeavour to exercise some peculiarly British rights – steadfastly refuse to change their dirty underwear.
The YouGuv survey viewed with a discerning eye the washing habits of the nation. While Liberal Democrat supporters, perhaps indicating their greater concern for the environment, were happiest to wear their jeans, jumpers, and T-shirts several times between washes, when it came to their undergarments carbon footprints proved less pertinent than personal hygiene and unsoiled drawers.
By contrast, the UKIP faithful – usually so overprotective when it comes to the status of whites – worried about their damn undies not one jot. They certainly don’t care about the environment, but nor it seems do they care about the excremental stains covering those thin layers of cotton which scarcely hide their vulgarities from the rest of the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly when it comes to UKIP adherents, a respectable veneer masks a murky truth.
Just 79% of UKIP supporters professed to washing their pants and knickers after each wearing, compared to 85% of Conservative supporters, and 87% of those allied to Labour and the Lib Dems. Of the filthy 21% remaining, 4% of UKIP supporters wash their underwear after 3-5 outings, 1% after 6-9 angry excursions into our falteringly multicultural streets, and another 1% wait a shocking 10 times or more before finally admitting their now barely salvageable dung depositories to the wary embrace of the wash.
9% of UKIP supporters found the question inapplicable, suggesting – if we assume they weren’t too stupid to answer – that they either abstain from underwear altogether, or wear it indeed only never wash. Nudism might have been practised in some parts of the Empire. But today it carries more than a whiff of the Continent, of saunas and beaches and so on and so forth, so that we can only presume that this dirtiest of protests demands freedom from soap suds and spin cycles, rather than the thrill of fresh air on uncovered loins.
Always eager to deflect attention, their raison d’être finding someone else to blame, without dazzling underwear among their possessions, UKIP instead might turn to the Greens. Marginalised within British politics, they were ignored too by the YouGuv survey, meaning that when it comes to their levels of cleanliness, we are left to stereotype and speculate.
Still it is hard to imagine anyone or anything as thoroughly revolting as the aforementioned UKIP supporters. The members of no other party seem so content to wallow in their own filth. Far be it for us at The Shimmering Ostrich to impose rules and regulations on the voting process, never mind anything like restrictive red tape, but yellow hazard signs might soon become necessary, for faced with such vulgar indecency, when will entering the polling station begin to endanger our health?
