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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, 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 already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on religion

He: I come 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 that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare 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 their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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