🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Former insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: 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, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

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

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, 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 certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, 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 paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. 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 look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look 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 alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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