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Meeting the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

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

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 discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage 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 seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people 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. However I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits 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 not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail 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 appear out of place. 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

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

Conclusion

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the train stop

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