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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained 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

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: 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 appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. 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 future. 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

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I hail 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: 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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