🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both 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 focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who are native to the area, including non-white white British, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” 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 small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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