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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

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

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; 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 international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. 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 had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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