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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

Eva: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be receptive

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, 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 used that money to develop green infrastructure

Eva: 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 coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, 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 radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the eastern part of London. 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 that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, 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 believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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