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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Typically Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

Eva: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff 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 education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop 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 require 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 advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not 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 gentrified. Naturally, 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 very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

Eva: We both said that we’d had a lovely time