🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

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

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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