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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: 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 kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

Eva: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited 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 white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. 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

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, 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 gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. 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 overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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