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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: 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 home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, face limited access to the essential services, 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 warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes 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 abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus 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 used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world 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 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 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 Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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