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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

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

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

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

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

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

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

Key disagreement

She: 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, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. 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 warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, 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

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

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 limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. 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 that local market, I appear out of place. 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

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

Conclusion

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

Eva: We both said that we’d had a lovely time