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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just disagree that 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 used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. 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

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, 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 segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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