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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; 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 receptive

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, nice person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

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, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: 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 told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. 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 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute 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

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

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