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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Usually Tory, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s far from it when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Psychology graduate

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

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

Eva: He was certainly 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 more and more people are entering. Whereas I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

He: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Wages are kept low, so levies have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on child support, on education, on technology

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here 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 only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff 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

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, transition from fossil fuels. 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 the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits skyrocketed after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to develop 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 in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the limited quantity we’ll require in the future. 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, windfarms and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in the Arab world were extremist, which I didn’t think accurate. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

He: I come from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, 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 doesn’t like that word, to her it implies poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

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

Takeaway

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

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