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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “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 opened the weapon systems”

Eva, 25, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

Eva: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white 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 figures are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers 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 earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. 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 agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the station

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