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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount 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, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I hail 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 Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the station

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