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Meeting the Participants

Steve, sixty-four, Essex

Profession: Former insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in a left-leaning London borough and voted for the SDP

Amuse bouche: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have opened the weapon systems”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Profession: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her home country, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of Labour and Green

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her most extended voyage was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

For starters

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, well-spoken, pleasant person

She: I had a caprese salad, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was certainly on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are arriving. However I just disagree that the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have used 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 – allocate additional funds on child support, on schooling, on innovation

She: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it happened. He explained it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could come here and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

He: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the scheme; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Previously, migrant laborers coming in were undermining local employees. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; 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 workers from other countries

Sharing plate

He: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. 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 the conflict began, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

Eva: 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 continuing our own oil exploration for the limited quantity we’ll need in the coming years. I kind of agree with him. We’re still going to rely on air travel. We both think we should be moving towards greener solutions, windfarms and hydro

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

Steve: I come from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I look like a foreigner. People stare at me because it’s become predominantly Islamic. She gave a slight glance at me about that. I used the word “ghetto”. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it implies deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe enclave?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat discriminatory, or xenophobic

Conclusion

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

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