🔗 Share this article

Meeting the Participants

Stephen, sixty-four, Essex

Occupation: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Tory, except when he lived in a left-leaning London borough and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His focus in insurance was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is dull, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the North Koreans have activated the weapon systems”

Evie, 25, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has been employed as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was six months, which is a significant duration to be on a boat

Initial impressions

Eva: Steve appeared there to have a nice time, to be open

He: She seemed like a very intelligent, well-spoken, nice person

Eva: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was delicious

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being reduced. He believes that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because more and more people are arriving. However I just don’t think the numbers are that bad

Steve: I’m for qualified migrants, I don’t want to live in a homogeneous, WASP country with tepid ale. But I maintain that authorities have used immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – spend more money on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of Brexit, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He explained it to me in a different perspective. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could come here and only be paid the wage of the their nation of origin

He: Macron spent two years getting the EU to abolish the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff that were imported; since then it’s been service industry, agriculture. She understood that, because she’d worked on a passenger vessel and said she was earning significantly higher than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be ideal to have a alternative power, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, 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 used that money to develop eco-friendly systems

Eva: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll require 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 greener solutions, turbine fields and water power

For afters

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 Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on religion

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 appear out of place. People gaze 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 poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a alternative term – maybe community?

Eva: I believe that Muslim people are really disproportionately shown in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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 wonderful evening