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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

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

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, 25, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: 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 love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. 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 coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. 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 very Muslim. 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 their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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