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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed 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 EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, 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 supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity 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 moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local 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 implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the station

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