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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Evie, 25, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, pleasant person

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

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: 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 authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was 16 and abroad when it occurred. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and receive solely the wage of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were imported; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” 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 in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount 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 moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on religion

Steve: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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