🔗 Share this article

Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, except when he lived in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP 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 levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers 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 workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal 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 Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require 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 hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It appears a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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