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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Typically Conservative, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

Interesting fact: 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 focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who already live here, not just white British, face limited access to the essential services, 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 warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – 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 two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed 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 allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity 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 advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. 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 denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, 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 lovely time