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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

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

For starters

Eva: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be receptive

He: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

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 small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

For afters

She: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance 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 poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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