🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

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

For starters

Eva: Steve seemed focused on enjoying the meal, to be open

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes 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 entering. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, 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 build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need 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, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. 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 very Muslim. 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 denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the train stop

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