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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. 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 cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

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 limited quantity we’ll need 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, turbine fields and hydro

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 mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, 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 predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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