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Meeting the Individuals

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former underwriter

Voting record: Usually Conservative, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

Eva: 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 reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

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

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: 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: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. 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 consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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