🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: 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 limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come 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 that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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