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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Political history: Typically Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

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

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. However 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 raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on technology

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

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require 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 hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on 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 accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, 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 gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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