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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained 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 wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require 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 hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

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 segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the station

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