🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty 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 activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

She: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: 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 thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

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 note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

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: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes 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

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