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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in underwriting was hostage situations: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have opened the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

For starters

She: Steve seemed there to have a nice time, to be open

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, nice person

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

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about “posted workers” – candidates could come here and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, 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 international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: 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 love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop green infrastructure

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 maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street 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 deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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