Dining Across the Divide: Viewpoints on Immigration and Society

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

She: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: 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 struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped 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 great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling 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 environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

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 the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. 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 predominantly Islamic. 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 alternative term – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

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 lovely time