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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

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 exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: 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 undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then 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

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 energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. 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 need 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 moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

For afters

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – 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 feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, 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 wonderful evening