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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

She: Steve appeared there to have a nice time, to be open

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. However I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

For afters

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the station

She: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening