🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” 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 discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, 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 clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff 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 international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity 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 advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

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