🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

He: 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 governments have used 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 are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

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 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 Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

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 modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” 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 appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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