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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

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 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 Ukraine started, 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 limited quantity we’ll need 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 greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, 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 “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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