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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Canvey Island

Occupation: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed 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 appeared there to have a nice time, to be open

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood 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 great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. 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 use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. 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 “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 theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the station

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