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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. 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 governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity 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 water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – 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?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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