🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

Interesting fact: Eva has worked 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 seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, 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 occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship 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 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 skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, 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 predominantly Islamic. She had a little look 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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