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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

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 “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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