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Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, 64, Canvey Island

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

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

Eva: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

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

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents 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. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities 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 minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, 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, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street 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 segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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