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Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

She: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed 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 EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff 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

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need 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 water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – 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 faith

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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