The Swileys' prefab would be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters during election campaigns. In 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' posters glued on their coalhouse door. For anyone who was even vaguely sympathetic to Labour this was bad news. The impact made by the posters on the Swileys' prefab was comparable to that of the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 which led to the fall of the first Labour Government.
Four general elections were held during our prefab years and the Conservative Party won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (His mischievous winks were completely wasted as Leon Trotsky was hardly a household word on the prefab estate.)
Twiverton forms part of the proletarian heartland of a Tory constituency and is solid Labour territory. However it seems unlikely that Twiverton will remain solidly Labour for very much longer. The rash of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters acted as political acid in dissolving Labourist loyalties. The Conservative Party HQ on the London Road quickly cottoned on to the fact that the Swileys were a secret weapon, and if fewer than two posters were seen on display in prefab number twenty-five a batch of new super-sized ones were speedily delivered. Voters wearing red rosettes en route to cast a vote at the polling station would break down and sob if they caught sight of the forest of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters. Other candidates sensed the chance to make a decisive breakthrough. (In the late 1950s and early 1960s these were Edgar Dickens - Bath Dickens Society stalwart and Liberal Party candidate, Edna Browning - recently knighted expert on trade union affairs from Tottenham and Conservative Party candidate, and Gilbert Youth of the World Government Party who - win or lose - would continue to hold his mild and bitter constituency surgeries in a number of local watering holes).
On each of the nine days of the 1926 General Strike copies of the Worker's Voice rolled off secret printing presses in railway arches on the Lower Bristol Road. One of its editorials
described Twiverton as "the linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged/soft water terrain inhabited by stone masons, cabinet makers, shop workers, solicitors' clerks, and domestic workers. Ghosts from its Chartist, Luddite, Leveller and Muggletonian past pace up and down its terraced streets." It is hard to see such Left political romanticism returning to Twiverton today (although history always likes to surprise.) The Conservative Party election victories of 1955 and 1959 signalled the emergence of what Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one likes to call "the effluent society." The concerns of the labourer in the prefab were pushed off the agenda of the political class, and those with terrapins in back gardens came into their own.