🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Profession: Retired insurance professional

Voting record: Usually Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, 25, London

Profession: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her home country, New Zealand, she supported both progressive parties

Amuse bouche: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

He: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

The big beef

Eva: He was certainly on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, face limited access to the things that they need, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are so problematic

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Sharing plate

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, transition from fossil fuels. I don’t like pollution, I love the clean air, I appreciate rural areas. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of Norway?” 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 not a good way to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling 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 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 extremism coming here – he did mention 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 faith

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

He: I think we separated amicably. We had a hug at the station

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