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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: 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 at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant 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 reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop 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 supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – 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 different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the train stop

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