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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people 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 authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped 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 different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits 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 proceed. 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, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – 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 make judgments 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 gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance 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 their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a hug at the station

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