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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. 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. Whereas I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on innovation

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were imported; since then it’s been hospitality, farms. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour 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 advancing to greener solutions, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

She: We touched on 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 the Arab world were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

He: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. 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 objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. 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 overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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