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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Tory, apart from when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance 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 opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

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

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks 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 increasing numbers are entering. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told 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 two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

He: 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 love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: 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 need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the East End. 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 had a little look 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 poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

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 lovely time