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Meeting the Participants

Stephen, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

Political history: Typically Tory, apart from when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and supported the SDP

Interesting fact: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning evacuating people from South Korea because the North Koreans have activated the missile silos”

Eva, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her home country, Aotearoa, she supported both Labour and Green

Amuse bouche: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her most extended voyage was six months, which is a long time to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

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

She: I had a caprese salad, pasta with fungi, and a creamy dessert thing, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that British people who are native to the area, not just Caucasian Britons, face limited 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 white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with tepid ale. But I believe that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – 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 16 and abroad when it happened. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – people could arrive in the UK and receive solely the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: The French president spent 24 months getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting local employees. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were brought in; since then 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

Sharing plate

He: It would be great 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 Norway?” Their energy revenues skyrocketed after Ukraine started, they used that money to build eco-friendly systems

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to go about things. He was in favour of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need 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 hydro

For afters

Eva: We touched on Islamophobia, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I felt was not accurate. I think it’s discriminatory 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 modernized. Obviously, I would say that: populated by professionals. 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 segregated area. Eva’s got Polish-Jewish ancestry – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I believe that followers of Islam are really disproportionately shown in the media as doing things wrong. It appears a little bit discriminatory, or prejudiced against foreigners

Conclusion

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

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