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Introducing the Individuals

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Psychology graduate

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

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

For starters

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

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

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. 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 tepid ale. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on innovation

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

Steve: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, 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 energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to develop eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in the Arab world were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

He: I hail 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 predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. 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 theirs.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit racist, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

Eva: We both said that we’d had a lovely time