🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

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 evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, 25, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: 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 longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, 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 definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. 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 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. 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 hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require 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 moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced 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 gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

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

Takeaway

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

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