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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Usually Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

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

For starters

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

He: She seemed like a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He told me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. 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 earning significantly higher than workers from other countries

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, 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 Ukraine started, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll require in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by extremism coming here – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

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 appear out of place. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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