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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Conservative, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

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 used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

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

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, 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 Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – 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 alternative term – maybe community?

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

Takeaway

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

She: We both said that we’d had a wonderful evening