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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Conservative, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. 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

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: 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 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 allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

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 small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. 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 very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the train stop

Eva: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening