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Introducing the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

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 governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff 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 schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. 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 Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration 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 advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, 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 very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

Steve: 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