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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, 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 British people who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: 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 exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. 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, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: 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 small amount we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

For afters

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 Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail 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 Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze 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 implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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