An English teacher and a personal trainer disagreed over the UK’s net zero target, the size of the civil service and defence spending during a meal staged for the Guardian’s Dining Across the Divide series.
Edward, 38, a secondary school English teacher from Bristol, and Martin, a personal trainer, met for dinner. Martin said he was “slightly apprehensive, wondering if it would descend into an argument”, but concluded that his dining partner was “a really nice guy”. Edward said the two “got on really well” and described it as “a delightful evening”.
On emissions, Martin said net zero was “basically impossible” and argued that handing people an impossible target makes them give up. He described carbon capture as fundamental to the UK’s ability to reach net zero, adding that nobody has yet proved it can be scaled beyond test sites.
Edward took the opposite view, saying that without a target “nobody works towards anything”. He argued for more oversight to ensure money goes to measures most likely to have the biggest effects, rather than “box-checking”.
The two also differed on how much warming is likely. Martin said the temperature limit was supposed to be 1.5C but could reach as high as 3C, which he said made the effort pointless. Edward called that position “slightly nihilistic”.
Turning to public spending, Martin said the civil service employs more than 550,000 people and that he considered the figure too high. He cited the former head of No 10 communications under Boris Johnson, who found there were 4,000 more communications staff than had been realised, and said technology could fix many problems rather than hiring more people.
Edward said the number was not “crazily large” given the scale of the issues to be addressed and the size of the population, arguing that better management was what mattered. He warned against ministers with no experience in the relevant areas making sweeping changes to boost their CVs.
On defence, Martin said spending should rise but be directed at cyberwarfare and drone technology rather than soldiers. He said he found Edward’s argument interesting: that some defence costs will be triggered by the climate crisis, through conflicts over resources and mass migration from countries becoming unliveable.
Edward said the pair agreed future attacks were unlikely to involve bombs or an invasion of the UK, but rather strikes on banking systems or drone attacks. For him, defence means being able to exist and support yourself if cut off from the outside world, and he argued that vulnerability to oil prices is vulnerability to conflict. He described energy independence as one of the strongest lines of defence against foreign bad actors, pointing to the UK’s sea, sun, wind and nuclear capacity.
Martin said he had assumed Edward would regard nuclear power as abhorrent, but he did not. He said his takeaway was realising that not everyone involved or invested in the environmental movement thinks alike, and that while he was unsure whether his mind had been changed, Edward had definitely made him think.
Edward said it was lovely to meet someone he probably would not normally come across, and that he had expected Martin to be much more extreme. He said the two were not so different in what they wanted — only in how they proposed to get there.
The profiles note that Edward runs spoken word poetry nights in Bristol and that his voting record is mostly Conservative, though he voted for Tony Blair. Martin is described as a former stressed-out, unfit lobbyist who took up running, progressing from 10Ks to ultra-marathons and, at 50, running around a 400m track for 24 hours.
For dinner, Martin had squid to start, followed by crab pasta with pistachio and chilli, a Sicilian lemonade and an affogato. Edward chose tuna tartare, beef ragu with a glass of red wine, and also finished with an affogato.
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