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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

Amuse bouche: 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 at sea

For starters

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

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

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

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, 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 earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build 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 continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity 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 environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

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. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. 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 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 different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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