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Introducing the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and supported the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, London

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: 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

She: Steve appeared focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

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

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, including non-white white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because more and more people are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He told me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; since then it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People gaze at me because it’s become very Muslim. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. 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 wonderful evening