🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

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

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

He: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, 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 skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. 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 water power

Dessert topics

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 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 Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

Steve: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the station

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