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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, 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 came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think 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 warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I hail 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 appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the station

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