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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. However I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed 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 come here and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; 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 workers from other countries

Common ground

Steve: It would be great 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity 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 moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

She: 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 lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think 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. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. 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 implies deprivation. 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 disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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