🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

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 love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

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 need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I come 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 Chrisp Street 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 different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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