🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: 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 seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. 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 ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. 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 need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think fair. 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 modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

She: We both said that we’d had a lovely time