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Meeting the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities 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 can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised 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 hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed 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 build green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come 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 that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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