Dining Across the Divide: Viewpoints on Migration and Culture

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former underwriter

Political history: 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 boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

Amuse bouche: 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 at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She came across as 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 certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

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 authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, 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 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates 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 scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. 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 different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries 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 that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze 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 implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” 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

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the train stop

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