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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Political history: Usually Conservative, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

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

Eva, 25, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, 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 long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. Whereas I just disagree that the figures 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 believe that authorities have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here 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 two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was revised in 2018. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I love the countryside. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be moving towards environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in the Arab world were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to make judgments based on faith

He: I come 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 Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. 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 different word – maybe community?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the station

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