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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

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

For starters

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

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

The big beef

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 more and more people are entering. However I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified 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 salary of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

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 small amount 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 moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. 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 “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. 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 media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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