🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be great to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. 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

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory 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: full of yuppies. 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 doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam 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 wonderful evening