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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

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

For starters

Eva: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

He: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks 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 arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

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

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining 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 international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: 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 oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

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 small amount we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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