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Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Former insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: 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

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

He: She came across as a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, 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 clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: 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 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 build green infrastructure

She: 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 moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

He: 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: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare 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 objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

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 lovely time