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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: 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

Eva: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

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

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, 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 numbers are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the future. 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 hydro

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

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

Conclusion

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

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