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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, 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 energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop 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 in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I kind of agree 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

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come 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 that local 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 segregated area. 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 consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

Eva: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening