🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, 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 soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, 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 very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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