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Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

She: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, 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 numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and receive solely 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. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: 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 agreed 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

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I come from the East End. 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 appear out of place. People stare 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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