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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, 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”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

Eva: 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 reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes 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 the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. 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 environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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