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Introducing the Individuals

Steve, 64, Essex

Occupation: Retired insurance professional

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

Interesting fact: His focus in underwriting was kidnap and ransom: “Everyone always says that insurance is dull, but it’s far from it when you’re planning evacuating people from the Korean peninsula because the DPRK have activated the missile silos”

Evie, twenty-five, London

Occupation: Psychology graduate

Political history: In her native land, Aotearoa, she voted a combination of progressive parties

Interesting fact: Eva has worked as a singer on ocean liners; her longest trip was half a year, which is a long time to be on a boat

For starters

She: Steve appeared there to have a nice time, to be receptive

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

She: I had a tomato and mozzarella dish, mushroom pasta, and a rich sweet treat, it was very good

Key disagreement

She: He was definitely on the side of immigration being curtailed. He believes that UK residents who are native to the area, including non-white Caucasian Britons, 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 white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country with warm beer. But I maintain that governments have exploited immigration to occupy positions they can’t get people to do without raising wages. Wages are suppressed, so taxes have to be minimized, so we are unable to improve services – allocate additional funds on childcare, on schooling, on technology

She: I am not deeply informed of the EU referendum, because I was 16 and not living here when it occurred. He clarified it to me in a new light. He informed me about EU labor migrants – candidates could arrive in the UK and receive solely the wage of the country they came from

He: Macron spent 24 months getting the EU to abolish the system; it was reformed in 2018. Before that, migrant laborers coming in were undercutting British workers. Under Gordon Brown, it was petroleum staff 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 different energy source, come off of oil. I disapprove of environmental harm, I love the clean air, I love the countryside. We agreed on a lot of that. But I said, “What do you think of the Scandinavian nation?” Their energy revenues soared after the conflict began, they allocated those funds to build 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 supportive of maintaining domestic drilling for the small amount we’ll need in the future. I partially concur with him. We’re still going to use planes. We both think we should be advancing to environmentally friendly options, windfarms and hydro

Dessert topics

Eva: We briefly discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, though we avoided labeling it. He seemed concerned about extremism coming here – he did note that a many individuals in Middle Eastern countries were radical, which I didn’t think fair. I think it’s discriminatory to form opinions based on faith

Steve: I hail from the East End. I asked her if she’d been to that district, and she said it had been modernized. Naturally, I would say that: populated by professionals. But when I go down that local 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 objects to the term, to her it denotes deprivation. I said, “No, it’s an area that becomes their own.” I agreed to use a different word – maybe enclave?

She: I feel like followers of Islam are really overrepresented in the news outlets as doing things wrong. It seems a little bit discriminatory, or xenophobic

Takeaway

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

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