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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

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

Initial impressions

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

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas 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 maintain that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount 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 greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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