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Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Voting record: Typically Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, 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 came across as a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; 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, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel 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 found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. 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 require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments 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 Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. 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 theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that 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 parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the train stop

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