🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

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

Initial impressions

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

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, 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 explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then 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

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, 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 oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think 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 gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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