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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for 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 discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

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

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs 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 technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build 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 limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. 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 briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come 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 Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. 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 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 agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

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

Takeaway

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

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