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Meeting the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. 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 innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained 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

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel 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 don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed 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 go about things. He was in favour 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 environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. 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 segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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