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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

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

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

She: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

She: 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 reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been service industry, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. 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 used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration 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 anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments 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 gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Polish-Jewish ancestry – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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