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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

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

For starters

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

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified 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

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: 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: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local 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 implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the train stop

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