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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says 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 missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, 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 are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, 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 energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

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

Steve: 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: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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