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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

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

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

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

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified 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 country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. 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 great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they used that money to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. 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 segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

Steve: 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