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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just white British, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers 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 different energy source, 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 Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – 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 feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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