You can always tell when election day is approaching in Twiverton. The front of the Swileys' prefab will be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters. At the last general election of 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' poster nailed up on their coalhouse door and another one glued to their water-butt. How many they had pasted up in the sitting room and on the front of their parrot's cage is anyone's guess.
There have been four general elections since we first moved into the prefabs, and the Conservative Party has won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" says Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (Someone should tell the newly arrived resident of prefab number three that his mischievous winks are being completely wasted. No one else on the prefab estate has even heard of Leon Trotsky).
Twiverton is a reddish hued Labour enclave on the western industrial side of Tory Bath. It has been solid Labour Party territory for years, although the odds on it staying this way are shortening by the day. The 'Vote Labour!' posters that periodically blaze out of the Swileys' prefab act like political acid in dissolving old affiliations and loyalties and reconfiguring others. Their twin effect is to give Labour voting a bad name and encourage passers-by to take a more sympathetic look at the qualities of the other parties' candidates. At the last local elections these wee the formidable Mr Edgar Pearce (resident of Camelot Green, President of the Bath Dickens Society and Liberal Party candidate), Edna Browning - soon-to-be-knighted expert on trade union affairs who has moved here from her council house in Tottenham (the ConservativeParty candidate), and Gilbert Youth (the World Government candidate who - win or lose - will continue to hold mild and bitter constituency surgeries in his base in the My Full Moon public house).
A thumb-nail sketch of Twiverton published in The Worker's Voice on the eve of the General Strike of 1926 described it as "a linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged terrain despite its soft water which includes coal mines, a wool mill, a major crane manufacturing company, and the terraced house retreats of stone masons, cabinet makers and oppressed solicitors' clerks." Romantics on the political left have long regarded Twiverton as almost mythic territory in which echoes from a distant Chartist, Luddite and Leveller past (and perhaps a Muggletonian one as well) can still be heard today. It is only after they come here on a visit and see the Swileys' prefab with its startling array of 'Vote Labour!' posters that they are liable to succumb to dark thoughts about socialist ideas being hopelessly enmeshed with quasi-messianic and utopian fantasies.
It would be pushing it too far to say that the crucial factor behind the Conservative Party's electoral success in 1951, 1955 and 1959 has been the Swileys. That said every council estate in the country is likely to have its Swileys. Die-hard Labour voters have been known to walk by the Swileys' prefab at number twenty-five, stare in disbelief at the forest of 'Vote Labour!' posters and the chaos in the front garden, and arrive at the polling station muttering "Any party but Labour!" No wonder Ray 'Short-Back-And-Sides' - Twiverton's indefatigable Labour Party candidate - has expressly forbidden anyone in his campaign team from giving the Swileys a 'Vote Labour!' poster. This has proved to be of no avail as Conservative Central Office keeps a special watch on the Swileys' prefab. If there are less than two posters on display a phone call is made to Labour Party HQ to demand that a fresh batch of 'VoteLabour!' posyers be swiftly dispatched to the Swileys' address.
Howarth Potter (the recently appointed pipe-smoking agent of the Twiverton Constituency Labour Party and author of 'Must Labour Go On Losing?' argues that the Swileys symbolise "the central strategic dilemma" facing the party's future. His starting point is Ernest Bevin's comment that the British working-class suffers from a "poverty of aspirations." This, he insists, is no longer the case. Since the late nineteen fifties the country has become choc-a-bloc with three-piece suites, Formica tables, record players, Do-It-Yourself stores, and television aerials. There is even some talk of people going on holiday in Spain. While rationing ended in 1954 Howarth Potter believes that a "rationing of the mind" continues to shape Labour Party thinking and philosophy. On his very first visit to our prefab estate the new party agent was introduced to members of the slick salesman's family who live in immaculate prefab number forty-six on the corner of Woodhedge Road. Not only do they have a television set, a Ford popular motor car, and a son at the grammar school -they have a telephone as well! Asked whether they would be supporting Labour in the forthcoming local elections the slick salesman replied - somewhat ominously - "It all depends." Then he added in a hushed voice: "Keep this to yourself, but we are floating voters."
Meeting the slick salesman's family was to have a potent impact on Twiverton's new Labour Party agent. The following year he convened a special meeting of the North-East Somerset Labour Party and urged members to "leave their 'rationing mind-set' behind and appeal to the upward thrusting, spic and span, ultra-ambitious and aspiring section of the new working-class. To voters who will float towards us if we have an attractive party image. To voters like the slick salesman who lives in prefab number forty-six."
A shocked silence followed and Councillor Short-Back-And-Sides', leader of Twiverton's Labour group, rose to speak. "What the party agent has said is all very well. But I cannot see how his spic and span/upward thrusting/aspiring strategy is going to appeal to our core supporters."
A shout then went up from the back of the hall. "Councillor 'Short-Back-And-Sides' has hit the nail on the head. Where will the new spic and span/upwardly thrusting/aspiring strategy leave the people who voted for us come rain or shine? And where on earth will it leave the Swileys!"