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Introducing the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

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

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very intelligent, articulate, nice person

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a rich sweet treat, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He thinks that UK residents who are native to the area, not just white British, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are arriving. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

He: 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 governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so levies have to be kept low, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. 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 energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they allocated those funds to build eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, 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 prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

Steve: I hail from the eastern part of London. 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 objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the media as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

Steve: I think we separated amicably. We had a embrace at the station

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