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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Profession: Former underwriter

Political history: Usually Conservative, except when he resided in “the socialist republic of south Hackney” and voted for the Social Democratic Party

Interesting fact: His specialty in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: People often claim that insurance is boring, but it’s not when you’re planning rescuing people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have opened the missile silos”

Eva, twenty-five, the capital

Occupation: Graduate in psychology

Voting record: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

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 focused on enjoying the meal, to be receptive

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

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

The big beef

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He thinks that UK residents who already live here, including non-white white British, don’t have as much access to the things that they need, because more and more people are arriving. However I just don’t think the figures are that bad

Steve: I’m for skilled immigration, I have no desire to reside in a homogeneous, WASP country with warm beer. But I maintain that authorities have exploited immigration to fill the jobs they struggle to staff without increasing salaries. Pay are kept low, so taxes have to be minimized, so we can’t do things better – spend more money on child support, on schooling, on technology

Eva: I don’t have that much knowledge of the EU referendum, because I was sixteen and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a different perspective. He told me about “posted workers” – candidates could arrive in the UK 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 reformed in 2018. Before that, posted workers coming in were undermining British workers. Under the former PM, it was petroleum staff that were imported; later it’s been service industry, 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

He: It would be ideal to have a different energy source, come off of oil. I don’t like pollution, I value fresh atmosphere, I appreciate rural areas. We found consensus on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their oil and gas profits soared after Ukraine started, they used that money to build green infrastructure

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

Dessert topics

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

He: I hail from the eastern part of London. I asked her if she’d been to Whitechapel, and she said it had been gentrified. Naturally, I would say that: full of yuppies. But when I go down that local market, I appear out of place. People stare 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 Eastern European roots – she objects to the term, to her it denotes poverty. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes theirs.” I consented to substitute a different word – maybe community?

She: I believe that Muslim people are really overrepresented in the news outlets as engaging in misconduct. It seems a somewhat racist, or prejudiced against foreigners

Takeaway

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

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