Dining across the divide: ‘He says net zero is a waste of money as we’ll hit 3C anyway. I think that’s nihilistic’

An English teacher and a personal trainer disagreed on emissions targets, but how did they fare on public spending and defence?

Edward, 38, Bristol

Occupation English teacher at a secondary school

Voting record Edward flips between Labour and Green

Amuse bouche He runs spoken word poetry nights in Bristol

Martin, 55, Brentford

Occupation Personal trainer

Voting record Mostly Conservative, but voted for Tony Blair

Amuse bouche He used to be a stressed-out, unfit lobbyist, and decided to make drastic changes. He started running 10Ks, then ultra-marathons, and when he was 50 he ran round a 400m track for 24 hours, “because I’m an idiot”

For starters

Martin I was slightly apprehensive, wondering if it would descend into an argument. But he’s a really nice guy.

Edward We got on really well. It was a delightful evening.

Martin I had the squid to start, then crab pasta with pistachio and chilli – it was lovely. Also, a Sicilian lemonade and my favourite dessert, affogato.

Edward I had a very tasty tuna tartare to start, then for main a beef ragu and a glass of red wine, and finished with an affogato.

The big beef

Martin My view on net zero is that we already know it’s basically impossible, and if you give people an impossible target, they give up. Carbon capture is fundamental to the UK’s ability to hit net zero, and nobody has yet proved that it’s scalable beyond test sites.

Edward If you don’t have a target at all, then nobody works towards anything. But I do think there needs to be more oversight, ensuring we’re putting the money into things that are most likely to have the biggest effects, and not just box-checking.

Martin The temperature limit was supposed to be 1.5C, but it could be as bad as three. If we’re going to miss it by that much, it’s pointless.

Edward He was saying we’ll probably hit 3C anyway, so what’s the point in spending the money? I think that’s slightly nihilistic.

Sharing plate

Martin The civil service employs more than 550,000 people. I think that’s too many. The former head of No 10 comms under Boris Johnson found there were 4,000 more communications staff than they realised. I think we could fix a lot of our issues with tech, rather than throwing more bodies at them.

Edward Given the scale of the issues they’ve got to address and the size of the population, I don’t think that’s a crazily large number of employees. What we need is better management of it. We don’t need ministers with no experience in these areas coming in and making massive changes because they want it to look good on their CV.

For afters

Martin I think we need to increase defence spending, not on soldiers but cyberwarfare and drone technology. I thought Edward had a really interesting take: that some of the costs of defence are probably going to be triggered by the climate crisis. Because if we continue where we’re going, there will be conflicts over resources and mass migration from certain countries as they become unliveable.

Edward We agreed future attacks are unlikely to be bombs or people invading the UK, but attacks on banking systems or possibly drone attacks. For me, defence means if something gets cut off from the outside, you’re able to exist on your own and support yourself. If you are vulnerable as a nation to oil prices, then you are vulnerable to conflicts. I think one of the strongest lines of defence against foreign bad actors is being energy independent – which we could be with proper investment. We’ve got sea around us, we’ve got sun, we’ve got wind, we’ve got nuclear.

Takeaways

Martin I assumed that Edward would have the view that nuclear power was abhorrent. But he didn’t. So my takeaway is realising that not everybody who’s involved or invested in the environmental movement thinks the same way. I don’t know if he changed my mind, but he definitely made me think.

Edward It was really lovely to meet somebody I probably wouldn’t normally come across. I thought he was going to be much more extreme than he was. I think we’re not so different in what we want, we just have different ways of getting there.

Additional reporting: Kitty Drake

• Edward and Martin ate at Citro, London, N6.

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