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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Political history: Typically Conservative, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white 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 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 governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. 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

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. 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 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 supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount 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 greener solutions, windfarms and water power

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, 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 predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – 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 different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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