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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay 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 technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad 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 only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, 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 stare 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 objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the train stop

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