Political Choice in Britain

Jim Hill voted Labour in the  general election. Jim worked as a welder for a Midlands company that was founded in  and made castings for the motor industry. He belonged to the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He rented a house, which he shared with his wife and three daughters, from the local council. Jim’s wife, who had stopped working when they had their first baby, shopped at ‘the stores’—the local Co-op was  minutes walk from their house. Jim did not think much about politics—although he paid his union dues and occasionally talked politics with his mates in the local pub. Like most people he knew, Jim had always thought of himself as ‘Labour’. He thought that a Labour government was more likely to look after the interests of working class people like himself. Even so, he did not expect much to change if a Labour government was elected. Life in Britain would carry on pretty much as it had since the end of the war, regardless of which party was in power.There was bound to be the occasional spot of trouble in the empire, and you could never be sure what the Russians might do in Eastern Europe. But he could not be bothered with all that.The foundry where he worked would keep him employed, with reasonable pay, until he retired with his company pension. His family would get better (and free) medical treatment than anything he had experienced as a child in the s and early s. And his daughters would certainly be better educated than he was. He expected that they would marry local boys from the same sort of working class background that he had come from. He also expected that they would live quite close to him and his wife when they brought up their own families. Jim’s granddaughter, Melanie, still lives today in the Midlands town where her grandfather spent his life, although the foundry where he worked closed in the early s. She lives in her own terraced house, which she is buying with her partner, in an area where  per cent of the population is Asian. After graduating from university in the early s, she became a teacher. She left in , disillusioned with work in the public sector, to become a customer services manager at a nearby airport. She expects to change her job again within the next five years.