🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

She: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. 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 earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, 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 maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed 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 accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come 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 had a little look 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 consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

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

Conclusion

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

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