🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

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

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. 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 paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. 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 soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive 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 rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We briefly discussed 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 Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, 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 predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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