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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, 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, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. 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 theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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