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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says 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”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, 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 energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration 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, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, 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 predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – 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 different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the train stop

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