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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She understood 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 love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need 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, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, 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 didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street 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 objects to the term, to her it denotes 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 disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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