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Meeting the Participants

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

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

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

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 love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared 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 go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: 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 radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze 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 Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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