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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired underwriter

Voting record: Typically Conservative, apart from when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was hostage situations: 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 DPRK have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, New Zealand, she voted a combination of 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 significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

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

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

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

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, 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 that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be kept low, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on child support, on education, on technology

Eva: I am not deeply informed of Brexit, because I was sixteen and abroad when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He told me about “posted workers” – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the country they came from

Steve: The French president spent two years getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was reformed in two thousand eighteen. Previously, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, agriculture. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

He: It would be great to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, 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 oil and gas profits soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build green infrastructure

She: So we’re dependent on their petroleum. You can see that’s not a good way to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount 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 advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and water power

Dessert topics

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to form opinions based on faith

He: I come from the East End. 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 that local market, I look like a foreigner. People stare 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 implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I consented to substitute a alternative term – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

He: I think we parted on good terms. We had a embrace at the train stop

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