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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: 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 seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll require in the future. 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

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, 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 Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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