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Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing evacuating people from South Korea because the DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

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

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

Steve: She seemed like a very bright, articulate, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that British people who already live here, not just Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just don’t think the numbers are so problematic

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I believe that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then 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 workers from other countries

Common ground

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 agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the small amount we’ll require 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, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit racist, 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