🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for 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 discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood 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 great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour 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 moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

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 note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: 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 that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze 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 alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

Steve: 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