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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

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

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that UK residents who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just disagree that the figures are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary 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. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later 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

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, 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 Norway?” Their energy revenues soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to proceed. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about radical ideologies entering – he did mention 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 religion

He: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, 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 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 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 little bit racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

Eva: We both said that we’d had a lovely time