🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

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

Initial impressions

She: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. 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 different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount 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 moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: 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: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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