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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

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

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, 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, not just white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

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

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal 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 energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, 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 doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

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

Conclusion

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

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