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Meeting the Participants

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

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

Amuse bouche: His specialty in insurance was hostage situations: “Everyone always says that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re discussing rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, 25, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she supported both progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on cruise ships; her longest trip was half a year, which is a significant duration to be at sea

Initial impressions

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

Steve: She came across as a very bright, articulate, nice person

Eva: 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 reduced. He thinks that British people who already live here, including non-white Caucasian Britons, don’t have as much access to the essential services, because increasing numbers are entering. Whereas I just disagree that the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I don’t want to live in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I believe that authorities have used immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without increasing salaries. Pay are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – allocate additional funds on childcare, on education, on technology

Eva: 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 informed me about “posted workers” – people could arrive in the UK and only be paid the salary of the their nation of origin

Steve: Macron spent two years getting the EU to do away with the system; it was revised in two thousand eighteen. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under the former PM, it was oil workers that were brought in; later it’s been hospitality, farms. She grasped that, because she’d worked on a cruise ship and said she was paid a lot more than international colleagues

Common ground

Steve: It would be great to have a different energy source, 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 soared after the conflict began, they used that money to develop green infrastructure

She: So we’re using their oil. You can see that’s an unfavorable approach to proceed. 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 advancing to environmentally friendly options, turbine fields and hydro

For afters

She: We touched on anti-Muslim sentiment, though we didn’t call it that. He seemed worried by radical ideologies entering – he did mention that a lot of the people in Middle Eastern countries were extremist, which I felt was not fair. I think it’s prejudiced to make judgments based on faith

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: full of yuppies. But when I go down Chrisp Street market, I appear out of place. People stare at me because it’s become very Muslim. She had a little look at me about that. I used the word segregated area. Eva’s got Eastern European roots – she doesn’t like that word, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe community?

Eva: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a somewhat racist, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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