🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

He: 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 very good

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks 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. However I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed 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 develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. 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 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 environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions 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 modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam 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 train stop

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