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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, 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 long time to be at sea

For starters

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

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: 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 the conflict began, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount 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 greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – 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 hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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